The Brink of Normal

Vertical Gardens

2009-08-31T11:26:00.006-05:00

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not really into a lot of the art that's out there; my personal tastes just aren't too avant garde. But this is pretty cool.

Ape: In the Air Tonight

2009-04-21T18:26:00.002-05:00

For reasons which cannot be explained, every time I watch this video it makes me laugh and watch again, leading to something that programmers call an infinite loop. In fact, I'm probably laughing and rewatching right now...

"An Overreaching Underachiever"

2009-04-14T18:14:00.011-05:00

"The Federal government has become what it is - an overreaching underachiever - partly because so many legislators seem to believe that every good idea should become a federal program and every bad idea should become a federal crime."
George Will

Time Warner Cable is moving toward metering and capping internet usage for its subscribers. New York Democratic Rep. and liberal DailyKos blogger Eric Massa calls this an "outrageous plan to tax the American people."

I'm not a big fan of the idea either, but this is exactly the kind of problem that the free market will solve on its own. Consider the two possibilities:

The company is telling the truth about its costs being inflated by a small percentage of voracious downoaders, or
They are exaggerating the costs, and they will be punished by the market as their customers leave for a competitor with a reasonable pricing structure.

If (1.) is true, then the proposed legislation only serves to make the internet provider business unprofitable, leading to higher flat rates for everyone. If (2.) is the case, the legislation would be completely unneccessary, but it wouldn't be repealed and would clog the books for forever or so.

In reality, I think the cable companies really want to cap usage for a self-serving reason: they want to make sure people don't use the internet to watch TV and thus cannibalize their main business.

Of course, the good congressman will get what he wants out of the situation: to be perceived as a crusader for the little guy.

Not a Flying Car...

2009-04-10T10:28:00.004-05:00

...it's a drivable airplane. It runs on unleaded gasoline instead of the leaded gas that many planes still use. The idea is that if you're a pilot, you just land and instead of paying through the nose for hangar space at the airport (which might not be available), you simply drive home.

As always, click the title to view the article...

Halftime Rock Fans

2009-02-11T12:58:00.004-06:00

Do you ever wonder where they get all those screaming fans to stand on the field at halftime of football games and cheer for the band? Wonder no more; here's the ugly truth.

Obama is Toast?

2008-11-04T19:38:00.003-06:00

As I write, the polls are just beginning to close across the nation. I'm reading an extremely interesting blog entry that has a unique take on politics that I've never really heard before. The guy, Sean Malstrom, is some sort of part-time or former pollster, and he argues that McCain will win the election.

I guess you can always find people carrying water for a candidate that will say that his candidate will absolutely win, but I don't get that feel here. By the time you're reading this we'll know if he was right; even if he isn't correct I'll be really interested to find out if any of his points have some validity...

The Undecideds *have* decided: they have decided not to declare their choice to pollsters... days away from the election and there are like 11% undecideds? No! This is not normal...

Lying to pollsters is frequent and a necessity in Pennslyvania due to the unions. Many union bosses will call their members, posing as a ‘pollster’, and if the member gives the wrong [answer], a thug is sent to the house. The Teacher’s Union there has sent strict orders to vote for Obama “or else”.

Really? In America, today? Wow...

With polling, the collective delusion is the belief that the product of polling is the data...The product of polls can [be] and often are the readers.

I'd never heard it put that way--readers are the product of polls; that is, the polls are designed specifically to deliver minds of voters. Of course that's true, but I'd hadn't thought about it exactly that way. To hear this guy tell it, the main thrust of Obama's campaign is to produce polls and news stories talking about the "inevitability" of his victory. I don't know if he's right about that, but I have inarguably heard a lot of versions of that story...

Lots of other intriguing points; He thinks Palin has saved this ticket (which is the polar opposite of conventional wisdom at this point); that McCain will definitely win Pennsylvania, and that you can tell by the visits that the candidates are scheduling that their internal polling is completely at odds with the polls we all see. He goes into great detail on that last point.

While the election was originally a referendum on Obama, it has now become a referendum on socialism. It won’t matter if a minority group (like african americans) turn out in record numbers because everyone else is turning out in record numbers as well. The youth vote is not turning out as it never does. As James Carville says, “You know what we call candidates who rely on the youth vote? We call them ‘losers’.”

Really, really interesting. We'll see if he's right.

Why the Electoral College?

2008-11-04T10:57:00.006-06:00

There seems to be growing sentiment out there to abandon the Electoral College as a anachronistic relic and ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote wins the presidency. Example: this article. Also out to end the Electoral College: no lesser a luminary than rapper and apparent presidential candidate Mos Def (who also provides some interesting ideas that I think both FDR and Karl Marx could be proud of):

Actually, the founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing. The idea is to ensure that the candidates are responsible to the whole country, and that we don't elect a "regional" candidate with overwhelming support in only a few areas.

Consider this scenario: a new but very well funded party bursts on the national scene. If there is no electoral college, they can focus all of their efforts on the top few urban centers in the country--they don't care about New Hampshire or Nebraska; they can get enough voters in just a few places to ignore most of the others. All they really need in most of the country is a small minority, say 20%, and then coupled with their strong support in the top cities that would put them over the top. With the electoral college, a candidate must work state-to-state to build broad support, and thus they are forced to be true national candidates. Smaller states matter since they cast all of their Electoral votes together and a candidate knows that 20% of votes in a state means zero Electoral votes. Candidates can't get by with only a small minority in all but a few states.

So, the Electoral College today forces viable candidates to be national candidates, and it also makes our elections far, far more difficult to buy. More than enough reason to keep it around, I'd say.

Political Dirty Tricks: or, How To Become a Felon

2008-10-26T20:47:00.004-05:00

This guy went to federal prison on charges of phone harrassment, and is living proof that it isn't just left-wingers who engage in election fraud.

...Although I think that dead people and cartoon characters can still be considered solid Democrat constituencies.

The former Republican political operative went to federal prison after he pleaded guilty to charges of phone harassment. He jammed the phone lines of New Hampshire's Democratic Party on Election Day six years ago.

"The concept was to disrupt lines of communication. That's a fancy way of saying, 'make it so the phones didn't work,' " Raymond said recently. "No calls going out. No calls going in."

Make Your Own X-Rays!

2008-10-26T20:35:00.003-05:00

Yes, all you need is some regular Scotch tape and a vacuum chamber!

On the Road Meets the Web Generation

2008-10-26T20:14:00.006-05:00

This one goes out to Official Friend of the Brink Ben; I'm a little afraid that he will actually follow the example of these folks and sell all that he has, buy an RV, have a kid named Tristan, and commence to drive around the continental US, stopping at campgrounds to be an occasional knowledge worker.

Tortured Genius: A Charlie Kaufman Profile

2008-10-26T19:42:00.008-05:00

Here's an interesting, in-depth article on the mind that brought you feature films Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation--one of the oddest and most imaginative ouvres in Hollywood.

I'm always interested in the intersection of art and business, and I always wonder how in the world you can have a multi-million-dollar enterprise like a feature film production depend on the whims of an artist trying to give birth to his beloved story. This article provides a window into the process.

Hitler, the KKK, and Planned Parenthood

2008-10-26T18:46:00.005-05:00

Planned Parenthood has done a pretty good job distancing their organization from the philosophy of their founder Margaret Sanger, a supporter of eugenics and a proponent of the removal of "human weeds". Perhaps history's most ardent eugenicists? The Nazis. In fact:

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazi regime forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people whom they viewed as mentally and physically "unfit", an estimated 400,000 between 1934 and 1937. The scale of the Nazi program prompted one American eugenics advocate to seek an expansion of their program, with one complaining that "the Germans are beating us at our own game".

Apparently folks today prefer to remember her as a heroic supporter of the rights of the regular folks to obtain contraceptives, and prefer to forget that she was well received after speaking to the Ku Klux Klan:

"I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan...I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses...I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak...In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered." (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)

So, count me out when you're celebrating the 92nd anniversary of the Margaret Sanger's first clinic.

Media Coverage in the US Elections

2008-10-26T16:48:00.005-05:00

OK, it's about time for a post, so here we go:

I stumbled onto a site called RussiaToday, which purports to be "a 24/7 English-language news channel" that brings "you the Russian view on the global news". I don't know what political bias they espouse; judging by this article from the GOP convention (Sarah Palin lays into Russia; Thousands of opponents take the streets and set up vigils outside the jailhouses of their arrested compatriots) it isn't American-style conservative. Anyway, they have a very interesting take on the role of satirists in American politics. The article compares the influence Jon Stewart on that of Rush Limbaugh from yesteryear. My opinion: Limbaugh has never been a balanced source of news, but at least there is discussion of the issues; Stewart's Daily Show and others of its ilk feature a shallow format more geared to a laugh every 7-10 seconds than any type of exchange of ideas. The result is the host verbally piling on to whatever target he prefers; with left-wing hosts those targets are, of course, overwhelmingly Republican. The fact that a substantial minority of the American electorate gets its political intelligence from "fake news" and late night shows is disturbing at best.

Speaking of late night shows, they seem to be making Republicans the butt of their jokes over Democrats by a ratio of 7-to-1; the article does bring up some interesting points besides bias as to why that gap exists, especially: Biden is way more boring than Palin. Actually, I think unbiased observers could find some pretty embarrassing gaffes by Biden, but I guess it's fair to say that Palin is more interesting and thus a much better ratings bet. And for a little more on late-night political coverage: here's a blow-by-blow of appearances by McCain and Biden on Letterman and Leno, respectively--note the very different tone. Of course, McCain had blown off and thus personally insulted Letterman, which resulted in what this Huffington Post blogger called "the most scathing performances I have ever seen a late night comedy host give" leading up to McCain finally appearing on Letterman's show.

Finally, here are some interesting thoughts on reasons for unbalanced coverage: lazy reporting in a media echo chamber, and the fact that lots of media people have a crush on him and don't want to know the whole truth.

RPT Makes Nueces County "Problem" Go Away

2008-06-11T23:33:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned in my last post, this year's Nueces County Convention was a flagrant abuse of rules and delegates, and the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) has supported the chairman who perpetrated it. The delegates who unsuccessfully opposed the chairman held their own convention, and it is the job of the RPT's Credentials Committee to review the evidence and decide which delegation to allow to participate in the State Convention.

Various committees have been meeting since Monday, but Credentials didn't meet until today at 11am, planning to spend only 2 hours reviewing 78 credentials challenges (the most since 1976, when Reagan conservatives new to the GOP scene were being accused of trying to "destroy the party"). Although each of Texas' Senatorial Districts sends a delegate to make up this committee, the chairman of the Credentials Committee (appointed by RPT State Chairman Tina Benkiser) didn't even bother to take votes from his committee; he simply pronounced his judgment on each case.

As for Nueces County, he rejected the rump convention and seated the County Chairman's delegation on a highly dubious technicality, claiming that the rump convention didn't officially notify the other delegation that they would be challenging them. However, it is clear that the RPT learned something from this situation: the Credentials Committee passed a rule for the meeting excluding all recording equipment.

In other news, the Nueces County rump convention delegates have finally been able to review the records from the convention they left (thanks to a court order), and they have more information about the delegates who outvoted them:

"We believe at least 36 delegates failed to vote in the Republican Primary, which would make them ineligible to serve in the capacity of delegate," said Vanessa Cahill. "Another 36 of the delegates appear to have been added at the Nueces County Convention, by members of the Credential Committee. The Credentials Committee Chairman actually appears to be among the names added."

There will probably be an effort tomorrow during the first general session to change the order of the convention from the floor and elect a convention chairman who would allow this issue to be revisited, but it has little chance of succeeding. I think it's fair to say that justice was not served here.

Texas GOP Convention: Republicans Mix It Up

2008-06-10T17:53:00.001-05:00

The Republican Party of Texas holds its 2008 Convention this week. (If you're new to all of this, you may want to check out my posts on Republican party officials and on the Republican convention process.) In contrast to most State Conventions over the past 20 years or so, this one may feature some major battles. I'm sifting through email, websites and blogs to get to the bottom of it, and here's what I'm finding.

There are allegations of illegal actions in several counties around Texas, where County Chairmen attempted to pack their County/Senatorial District (SD) conventions with ineligible delegates or prevent duly elected delegates from attending, and several who were accused of wrongdoing indicated that they had the support of the State Chairman. The most egregious of the violations (Nueces County) was captured on audio:

(Speaking as a delegate to many conventions, that is by far the most flagrant abuse of rules that I have ever heard.) A rump convention was held, where the delegates who believed that the rules were not followed held their own convention and elected their own group of delegates to the State Convention. Because there were two conventions held in Nueces County, a committee of the State Convention must choose which convention to accept--especially, which group of delegates to State will be seated.

The Nueces County situation highlights a huge problem at the State Convention. Since 1998, the State Convention has not finished organizing the convention (electing the permanent officers of the convention and finalizing the delegates who will be seated) until later in the convention. This allows more time at the podium for the State Chairman (who, by law, serves as Temporary Chairman and is often running for reelection) while allowing the Chairman to have another person serve as Permanent Chairman of the Convention during the often contentious debate that occurs later in the convention. Unfortunately, according to the Texas Election Code (TEC), this is also illegal. It also disenfranchises all of the delegates of Nueces County, as former Texas RNC Committeeman Tim Lambert notes in this blog entry:

Why does it matter? RPT rules (27d) require that delegations that have been challenged are not seated until their challenge is resolved. When the Credentials Committee report is not presented until after the vote for SREC members and nominations of Chair and Vice Chair of the party, those delegates' right to vote will be violated, because by the time they are seated, their opportunity to vote for SREC, State Chair and Vice Chair will have already passed.

A restraining order has been granted, been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction and is being refiled to force the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) to order its convention according to the TEC. Amazingly, the RPT under the direction of current Chairman Tina Benkiser, is vigorously fighting these legal challenges. The TEC is very clear that the convention must be organized before business is conducted. Even though each SD will have elected their SREC members and nominated a Chair and Vice Chair before the convention is officially organized, RPT lawyers are arguing, apparently with straight faces, that no convention business will have been conducted. The fact that the RPT's case is so weak, coupled with the fact that Chairman Benkiser is apparently dragging her feet, seems to indicate that the party is simply trying to delay the conclusion of the legal actions past Thursday, when the point becomes moot.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the situation with the order of the convention is the fact the the RPT is supporting the Nueces County Chairman, who refused to disclose the precinct convention minutes that would have made it clear that he added 100 unelected delegates. As Tim Lambert notes:

The RPT, under the direction of the current chairman, went to court to defend the illegal actions of the rogue county chairman and sought to punish the delegate seeking relief. The current state chair advised this county chairman and others that they were not required to release convention minutes, contrary to RPT rule 22b and the TEC.

There is one thing that many of the delegates who have been excluded and mistreated have in common: they were supporters of Ron Paul's presidential bid. While I didn't vote for Paul, I find this behavior despicable. To attempt to illegally silence someone because of their support for a candidate is completely insupportable. Benkiser is now being opposed by Paul Perry in her reelection bid, and I will wholeheartedly support his bid.

Texas GOP Conventions: An Overview

2008-06-10T15:52:00.000-05:00

The Republican Party holds its 2008 Convention this week, so it's a great time to give an overview of how the GOP works in Texas. I've already covered the Republican party officials who represent Republican voters in their areas. Now we'll look at the Republican conventions, where Republican voters attend conventions and represent themselves.

During even-numbered years, Texas Republicans hold a series of conventions at several levels: Precinct (neighborhoods), County/Senatorial District (depending on your area--some Counties are too big to hold a single convention), State, and finally the National Convention. The participants are always Republican voters who voted in the most recent GOP primary.

At each level, the convention is considered to be the Republican Party of the area (Precinct, County, etc.) they represent--their decisions establish the will and focus of Republican Party voters. Each convention does at least two things:

Elect delegates to represent the area at the next highest convention
Establish a "platform" that represents the views of the Party in that area

The larger the convention, the more work must be accomplished by committees before the majority of the delegates arrive. At Precinct Conventions, everything is handled at the convention, since there are usually just a handful of voters who show up, elect each other and a few neighbors to the County/Senatorial District Convention and sometimes present a resolution or two. By the State Convention, committees work up to 18 hours/day for 3 or 4 days before the majority of the delegates even arrive, sorting out the thousands of delegates to take part and reviewing hundreds of resolutions that will be whittled down to compose the Texas Republican Party Platform--among other things.

At the State Convention, an addition to electing delegates to the National Convention and adopting a platform, party officials on the Senatorial District, State, and National levels are elected as well--see this post for more on that.

At many State and National Conventions (as well as some County/Senatorial Conventions), there is a tension between two groups: Republican delegates and Republican officeholders. This is because the delegates often want to make their voices heard on a variety of subjects, some of which may be difficult or even embarrassing for officeholders from those districts. Conversely, State Representatives, Governors and Senators would all prefer that the coverage of this gathering of Republican activists from their districts be glowing in praise for those officeholders.

The focus of this tension is often on the Chairman. At State Conventions when a chairman is being elected, there will usually be a "grassroots" candidate who pledges allegiance to the average voter/delegates, running against an "establishment" candidate supported by the Governor or Presidential nominee, whose unspoken agenda will be to avoid embarrassment for those high elected officials from the State Conventions or SREC. For the past 15-20 years at the Texas State Convention, there have been very few differences of opinion between candidates on issues like fiscal conservatism, foreign policy or abortion--the choice is always about "management style".

Historically, there was a great amount of actual business transacted at party Conventions; party insiders at National Conventions actually chose nominees for President and Vice-President in "smoke-filled back rooms." In today's TV era, where sound bites reign supreme, parties want their conventions to be devoid of controversy and conflict, instead serving as rallies for the faithful and as a coronation for their nominees for high office. This also exacerbates the tension between the average delegates, who wish to speak their mind, and the Chairman, who would prefer a smooth, camera-friendly event without any infighting.

Next up: a preview of the 2008 Convention.

Texas Republican Party Officials: An Overview

2008-06-10T14:19:00.005-05:00

In conjunction with this week's 2008 Republican Party Convention, I'm doing some overviews of how the GOP works in Texas.

At every level, from neighborhoods to the entire nation, Republicans elect individuals to represent their areas in the time between the elections which are held every two years. Those representatives then serve as part of a body headed by an elected chairman, in much the same way a company's board works with its CEO. The body represents Republican voters in various capacities, often including public relations, fundraising, lobbying of officials, and in some cases even filling Republican ballot vacancies left by death or withdrawal. While their functions differ, the bodies on various levels are very similar. Here is an overview, from the lowest level to the highest:

Republican voters, in their biennial primaries, elect Precinct Chairmen from each neighborhood and a County Chairman for the entire county. The Precinct Chairs form a countywide Executive Committee headed by the County Chairman and together represent the Republicans of their County.
Republican voters, in Senatorial District caucuses held at the biennial State Convention, elect a Committeeman and a Committeewoman to represent them on the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC).
Republican voters, at the State Convention, elect a State Chairman to chair the SREC (and also run the state party, which has a staff and headquarters).
Republican voters, at the State Convention, also elect a National Committeeman and Committeewoman to represent the state (along with the State Chairman) on the Republican National Committee (RNC)
RNC members elect a Chairman to chair the RNC and lead the national party.

As you can see, the State Convention is a very important part of the process; many party officials are chosen there that will remain in office for at least two years (until the next State Convention), and in some cases for four-year terms. Next up: an overview of the GOP Convention process.

Stealth Bomber Crash

2008-06-07T14:17:00.005-05:00

Earlier this year a US B-2 Spirit stealth bomber crashed on takeoff in Guam due to water damage on some of its sensors. This video shows a successful takeoff, followed by the doomed plane's liftoff, pilot ejections and crash/burn sequence. (More info here) These planes cost between 1.2 and 2.4 billion dollars each, and due to their range, size (their wingspan is longer than the first flight at Kitty Hawk) and stealth capabilities, they are to the US air fleet what the aircraft carrier is to American sea power--not only a dominant force capable of striking decisively almost anywhere on the planet, but a "big stick" in US diplomacy that affects the way our enemies deal with us politically. This plane was one of only 21, so now we're down to 20.

Bonus: Here's an interesting article on the people who fly this baby.

Wildlife Battle

2008-06-06T10:32:00.002-05:00

You may have seen this, but if you haven't it's worth the time. It's a video shot by some tourists on a safari. It starts with some lions stalking some buffalo, and then they attack and catch a baby buffalo. But that's where things get interesting. Let's just say that by the time the video is over another predator makes an appearance, a lion flies through the air like a house cat, and we see some surprising herd behavior.

The Creation of Yao Ming

2008-05-28T10:07:00.003-05:00

I've heard that Yao Ming's parents were forced to marry by the communist leaders of China in hopes of producing a basketball prodigy. I found an article (which is actually a book excerpt) from TimeAsia magazine that gives the whole story on that, as well as Yao's story starting with his mother's youth and going through to his playing days with the NBA's Houston Rockets--all in 8 interesting pages.

As to the forced marriage? According to the article, it was an "arranged" marriage that they were "encouraged" to enter. Perhaps "forced" is too strong, but maybe not...

The Metric Revolution

2008-05-08T17:11:00.003-05:00

It seems that on this day in 1790, the French proletariat which had just taken over the country in the ongoing French Revolution decided to create what became the metric system. One thing I didn't know but that my nerdly mind finds very cool:

The system was elegant. All conversions were based on 10, with Greek prefixes (deka-, hecto-, kilo-) for multiples and Latin (deci-, centi-, milli-) for fractions.

I never realized that the multiple and fractional prefixes were from different languages. I guess kilo is Greek for 1000 and milli is the Latin word for the same number, and thus the etymology of the words explains the difference between kilometer and millimeter.

Among the changes that were made that didn't catch on: the 10-day week and the 10-hour day.

Be sure to check out the (short but great) article.

Obama vs. Wright on Race

2008-05-07T11:48:00.002-05:00

Thomas Sowell has an interesting take on the differences between Barack Obama and his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Sowell believes that Wright whips up resentment while Obama sells a sense of entitlement, but both are telling basically the same story:

The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.

It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.

Sowell, who is a black man from Harlem, tells three random stories:

South Korean schoolgirls studying 15 hours a day to get into top colleges;
a Harvard classmate who refused to ask his parents for new shoes he needed but that they couldn't afford;
a childhood friend who literally spit food out of his mouth when he realized it was given to him out of charity.

He ties them together thusly:

People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty-- telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethic of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior high school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity?

Be sure to check out the article.

Taxing the Rich

2008-05-06T11:53:00.002-05:00

It's election season, so the various candidates pull out their go-to rhetoric and we hear vague truisms about very complex issues like taxations shouted at us a lot. I found a very interesting breakdown for 2005, the most recent year for which breakdowns are available.

Before you check it out, ask yourself if you can answer some basic questions about the current tax structure in the US:

What percentage does the average American pay in federal income tax?
What percentage of Americans filing income tax returns didn't end up paying any?
Are you rich?

This article hits those points, and plenty of others, and it's interesting stuff. The 2005 answers to the above questions are 13.6%, 32.6%, and you're rich if you made 61,055 or more (if you define rich as the top 25% of Americans).

I don't know about you but my target income is above 61K, so remember next time you vote to soak the rich that it could be you and me.

Medical Arrogance and Butterfly Collecting

2008-05-05T14:13:00.002-05:00

Wired is a technology magazine, and this essay takes an interesting perspective on the need for the medical profession to use technology to enhance our knowledge of human wellness as opposed to human illness.

If you had died 50 years ago, your body would have stood a pretty good chance of serving science. In the 1960s, autopsy rates at US hospitals exceeded 50 percent. Pathologists weren't necessarily looking for what killed people — they were taking advantage of the fact that a body was available and ready for inspection. There was still much to learn about normal human biology, the thinking went, so every corpse was an educational opportunity.

It turns out that autopsies are now comparatively rare now as modern medicine is much more confident about its current body of knowledge. However, it seems that in medicine (as other fields such as in spying) our capacity to gather information has exceeded our capacity to understand it.

In heart disease, for example, CT screening tests can spot abnormalities in arterial plaque — but no research exists on whether that information is actually predictive of heart disease or stroke. "We need to know normal variation," says Pat Brown, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. "It's really underappreciated as a part of science." In too many areas, Brown argues, we're too quick to jump at any blip without understanding whether it's a true red alert or just normal background noise.

I believe that alternative medicine has something to offer in instances where conventional medicine doesn't have answers because conventional medicine tends to discount things in areas that are considered well-understood. Instead of ignoring apparent red herrings, the medical community should focus more on better understanding of normalcy (and thus a better understanding of abnormalcy).

It seems like it would be easy just to step back and survey the broad picture. But research costs money, and studying what's normal is generally considered trivial, dismissed as mere butterfly collecting. At the National Institutes for Health, for instance, all grants are given a "priority score," an indication of a project's novelty, originality, and "scientific merit." Normal need not apply.

Very interesting stuff.

OK, OK, More Posts!

2008-05-05T13:48:00.003-05:00

Carlos, an Official Brother-In-Law of The Brink, took some of his valuable time to harangue me this morning about the age of the posts here at the Brink of Normal. He's right, new entries have been few and far between here. Unbeknownst to him, I have been considering channeling some of the results of my regular net-surfing into this space to ensure that we have at least five new posts per week. So, with his goading, we'll try that this week.
I'll try to make them short and sweet for ease of writing and ease of reading. Leave some comments when you visit to let me know what you think.

"Nice Stolen Car!"

2008-04-04T14:19:00.003-05:00

An internet posse of Canadian gearheads used an online forum, Facebook and Google Maps to take down what might be the world's dumbest car thief -- and posted video of the arrest on YouTube.

The thief took a tricked-out Nissan Skyline GT-R for a test drive in Calgary and never came back. The owner, Shaun Ironside, 27, called the cops but figured the car was headed for a chop shop, never to be seen again.

Desperate, Ironside posted a thread at Beyond.ca, an automotive discussion forum with 46,000 members... The thief would be easy to spot, Ironside wrote in the post, because he's missing the middle and right fingers of his left hand. The car was pretty unique too -- a right-hand-drive model imported from Japan. The thread languished until the following afternoon when forum moderator James Lynch happened to spot the stolen Skyline and snapped a picture of the suspect behind the wheel -- waving his disfigured hand.

"I pulled out my camera, but I wanted to see his hand, so I did the rock out sign," Lynch, 22, told Wired.com, referring to the splayed finger gesture that's ubiquitous at heavy metal concerts. "He did it back and I saw his hand. I rolled down my window and yelled, 'Nice stolen car!'..."

Read the full story for more...

Flying Penguins

2008-04-01T18:49:00.002-05:00

This amazing BBC video shows penguins that fly.

Unbelievable? Yes. But it's on the internet, so it must be true.

Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico

2008-03-27T23:58:00.002-05:00

I can't exactly explain why I found this headline so funny. I think it's the idea of a riot breaking out over something like the style of music the kids are into today. Plus it features quotes like these:

"They're organizing to defend their right to be emo," wrote Daniel Hernandez of LA Weekly on his personal blog, which has provided stellar coverage of the whole affair.

But sadly there's actual violence with punks and metalheads beating the emo kids, targeting them as homosexuals due to the culture of their music:

Gustavo Arellano, the author of Ask a Mexican and an editor at OC Weekly, said that the sexual ambiguities cultivated by emo fashion helped set the group up for targeting by more macho groups.

Anyway, it's actually pretty sad. I'm always surprised at what people will riot over, so I guess we can add emo to that list now...

The Truth about NAFTA

2008-03-05T11:05:00.002-06:00

I've linked to an interesting (and short) article in the Wall Street Journal that compares the two big states that had primaries yesterday, Texas and Ohio. Democrats have been decrying NAFTA and promising manufacturing jobs in Ohio, but that hasn't come up in Texas because it has greatly benefited from that trade agreement. This article makes it clear that NAFTA isn't the culprit behind Ohio's problems--it's more about high income taxes and very pro-union laws. Apparently, the manufacturing jobs leaving Ohio aren't all heading overseas, but to pro-business states like...Texas!

By the way, the practice of blatantly lying to voters and telling them what they want to hear in order to get their votes is one of the main reasons people hate politicians. There has been talk that Obama and Clinton will try to "renegotiate" NAFTA, but it's obvious given the facts in this article that that will never happen. It was all theater to make it seem like the Democratic Presidential candidates could fix a problem that is actually caused by Ohio corporate tax laws designed to "soak rich corporations" and by other Ohio laws designed to protect unions (which are of course themselves supposed to protect their members).

Ah, politics.

Liberals and Self-Loathing

2008-03-04T16:58:00.003-06:00

Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, made some waves a couple of weeks ago when she said "...for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country..." It wasn't an accidental slip of the tongue; she said the same thing in two different speeches, so it seems to have been part of her prepared remarks.

This fits with a theory I've been developing: it seems that self-loathing is an important part of the liberal mindset. The above statement implies that Mrs. Obama, an American, has spent her entire adult life ashamed of America. In fact, today's liberal is ashamed and outraged about America's treatment of countless groups, including: Native Americans, African-Americans, women, homosexuals, illegal immigrants, suspected terrorists, and blue-collar workers.

But America isn't the only target of liberal loathing. Radical environmentalist rhetoric expresses shame on the part of the entire human race (of which radical environmentalists, of course, are part) for our treatment of the planet; rich liberals decry "big business" while at the same time profiting from it; and incredibly, liberal thinking is even ashamed of Western distrust of "conservative" Islamic political organizations (like Hamas) and governments (e.g. Iran), in spite of the fact that those groups' attitudes on points like women's issues, homosexuality, and free speech (to name just a few) could not be more disgusting to the liberal mind.

Now let me be clear: as a conservative American, I do not believe that our country has done right by all of the groups mentioned above. There are plenty of shameful decisions, policies and incidents in our past and present. However, I believe in my country, and I love it in spite of it's flaws. I believe that we should work to change those things that are wrong, but I also believe that we should celebrate the great good that is also part of our heritage.

So I'll say it this way: I'm proud to be an American, and that is regardless of whether my candidate is winning or not.

Electric Car, by Teenager

2008-01-29T10:31:00.000-06:00

My last post was about the bazillion-dollar efforts of a multinational corporation to build a new kind of hydrogen-electric car; this one is about a sixteen-year-old who built a plug-in electric pickup using 20 regular car batteries, an '88 Mazda, and $6K from his part-time job.

Taken together, I think that this is just another thing that's great about America. You've got a backyard do-gooder kid contributing to this effort (to create cleaner cars) because he believes it's the right thing to do, and a giant company doing the same thing--not because some government bureaucrat came up with an appropriate incentive to induce them to do so, but because it will be good for their bottom line. That's the kind of green innovation I like to see.

(thanks for the link goes to Carlos, the Official Brother-in-Law of the Brink)

GM's Hydrogen Car

2008-01-14T18:38:00.000-06:00

Today's automaker produces tons of models, and each model may be available with several combinations of transmissions and engines; plus there are countless electrical, mechanical, and computer systems, each with thousands of parts; making each different model means combining tens of thousands of components together; each model then has to be tested, etc. This is all very difficult and expensive.

GM is trying to revolutionize the auto industry with their hydrogen projects, and I've been keeping my eye on them for several years now because the whole concept is so cool. The idea is this: instead of the situation above, you can produce a single chassis that looks like a giant foot-thick skateboard and contains the motors (small electric motors near the wheels), the fuel storage (it runs on hydrogen), and the fuel cell (to convert the hydrogen to electricity). The steering will be electronic so there's no need for a steering column connecting to the wheels, so pretty much all of the working parts are in the chassis--to choose between a sedan, a pickup or a minivan you simply bolt the body you want on top. Since it's electric there's no transmission, so there are extremely few moving parts (which means very few possible things to break down). Theoretically, the cost and time required to develop new models could be a fraction of what it is currently; cars might eventually begin to last much, much longer as airplanes do (small planes routinely last for decades--they have very few moving parts outside of the engine).

Of course, there have been huge obstacles to overcome, some major ones being the safe storage of notoriously unstable hydrogen (remember the Hindenberg?), the efficient operation of the fuel cell (especially in cold weather), and fueling issues (consumers expect to be able to fuel quickly and to be able to carry enough to drive 300 miles on a fill-up).

Anyway, it seems that things are getting fairly close to production now, as apparently GM is still planning to have production models on the road by 2010. Below is a video of a British show driving GM's second-generation hydrogen vehicle the Hy-Wire.

And here's a link to photos and info on the third-gen vehicle, the Sequel, which is pretty obviously less futuristic and more acceptable to today's consumers than the Hy-Wire, which incorporated more futuristic ideas like controlling the acceleration and braking on the steering wheel instead of via pedals.

If you'd like to geek out about this stuff like some people, check out these links: Here's a blow-by-blow of the engineering and politics behind the beginning of GM's hydrogen projects between 2000 and 2003; here's a 2004 road test review of the Hy-Wire; and finally here is a science/engineering-heavy look at the Hy-Wire from HowStuffWorks.

Other auto companies, notably Honda and Toyota, seem to be advancing rapidly with similar technology, but info on them seems much harder to come by. I don't know if they're behind or if they are way ahead and are just waiting to spring their cool new stuff all at once. Honda's new FCX, which is supposed to enter limited circulation this summer (to the rich and famous?), seems to focus more on the hydrogen but still uses a more conventional setup with a large single motor and a transmission; still cool, but not the quantum leap in manufacturing simplicity and flexibility that GM's initiative promises.

Sleep in a Bottle

2008-01-07T17:26:00.000-06:00

As I attempt to return from some months of overwork and undersleep, this article is of particular interest. It seems that DARPA (the Department of Defense's Research and Development arm) might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness. The military has long been interested in technology to help keep humans awake, for obvious reasons--they gave pilots amphetamines as early as WWII.

This new stuff, still in early testing, is a nasal spray and seems to pretty well mimic natural sleep. Of course science doesn't seem to understand sleep very well at all, so who knows how this will turn out. These kind of things never seem to work quite as well as you'd think, and I speak as someone who has ingested way more caffeine than is really healthy of late.

Soviets Politics in America

2007-08-10T23:09:00.000-05:00

Finally, in the last of three random posts in a row: A former Soviet spy says exactly what's been on my mind, but better than I ever could.

Here are some quotes:

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler--as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink...

Competition is indeed the engine that has driven the American dream forward, but unity in time of war has made America the leader of the world. During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to defeat Nazism, but their country of immigrants remained sturdily united. The U.S. held national elections during the war, but those running for office entertained no thought of damaging America's international prestige in their quest for personal victory. Republican challenger Thomas Dewey declined to criticize President Roosevelt's war policy. At the end of that war, a united America rebuilt its vanquished enemies. It took seven years to turn Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into democracies, but that effort generated an unprecedented technological explosion and 50 years of unmatched prosperity for us all.

Great article. Here's a bonus quote on Soviet propaganda on the Vietnam War:

During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.

Here's a question: how much of the news we hear today is actually propaganda..? And a followup: how can you know for sure? Hmm.

The Mysterious Legoman

2007-08-10T23:01:00.000-05:00

Here's a weird thing: A giant lego man washes up onshore in Holland. No real details, except that, oddly, "the toy was later placed in front of the drinks stall."

I hereby call for an investigation.

Google: The Right Call?

2007-08-10T22:38:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm super-busy, but I've got several items to post here before I lose them, so here goes:

Google has announced a new, free, 411 service. Yep, you can call on your phone, talk to a pretty smart computer, and have it read to you from the phone book. It's pretty smart, and very interesting.

Now I like Google--their stuff is innovative, often best-in-class, and usually at a price that can't be beat (read: free). And they've figured out how to make a ton of money at those ridiculous rates. But as they keep dominating every industry they decide to enter, they are starting to scare me a little. I mean, 411 services, for crying out loud! It's pretty far afield from web search (which they'd argue, as their stated goal is to organize the world's information--but my point stands).

Don't misunderstand me; I'm a free-enterprise guy, and I don't think anybody should try to regulate them into little pieces or anything. I'm just saying that their seemingly unimpeded march through all in their path is making me a little nervous. I know their informal motto is "Don't be evil", but if they decide change their mind they could, I dunno... usher in the apocalypse or something.

All that said, if Google wants to buy any web properties from me, just a few million bucks could change my mind.

Life Imitates Art

2007-07-10T15:12:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you've seen this Pepsi commercial, with a giant Pepsi logo ball pinballing playfully around a city:

Now here is a real-life version of this story, which is somewhat more scary:

MEADVILLE, Pa. — A 1,500-pound wrecking ball broke loose from a crane cable and raced downhill, smashing into several cars and injuring three people before coming to rest in the trunk of a car at an intersection Monday.

If it wasn't so scary it might be funny, but it's still too soon; at least it seems like the injuries were mostly minor. Some things seem like a good idea until you actually see them happen, I guess.

As always, click on the title above for the full story...

The Next Big Thing: Arranged Marriages?

2007-06-29T11:06:00.000-05:00

You heard it here first, folks. Old is new, and the hot new thing looks a lot like...courtship.

The best way to find your partner for life could very well be the oldest: the arranged marriage, according to one trend expert.

“Today is the era of the arranged couple who fall into love around the birth of the first child," said Marian Salzman, co-author of "Next Now: Trends for the Future."

"It sounds traditional, but in some ways so much of the future is back to the past, turbo-charged,” she said.

...contrary to the "old" arranged marriage, in which children are forbidden from choosing their own partners, the modern arranged marriage is not about being forced into federation. It’s about relying on the matchmaking mastery of Mom and Dad.

“This is about picking a marriage partner — not about falling into bed for a world-class romance," said Salzman, whose trend forecasts are based on pattern recognition and what stylemakers are talking about.

Click the headline above to read the whole article...

"Governor, you had me at Roadkill"

2007-06-25T16:16:00.000-05:00

It seems that "Late Late Show" host Craig Ferguson has applied for honorary citizenship to the state of Texas. Governor Perry responded and Ferguson reads the letter, which is humorous, self-deprecating, politically incorrect, and probably destined for the same kind of across-Texas appeal as George W.'s "In Texas, we call it walking" quote. Check it out...

A Strange Thought

2007-06-05T13:10:00.000-05:00

Do you ever get the urge to do something really weird? For instance: find a sleeping person, sprinkle some spices on their ribcage, and then wake them up and announce "You've got thyme on your side."

No? Good, because that is bizarre. Me neither.

By the way, I keep talking to people who read the blog, but otherwise it's hard to tell if anybody is here. I even get emails sometimes--I even had a 20-email exchange/debate with a some people about this post--but zero comments. So, if you're reading this leave me a comment.

Thank you, that is all.

Money to Burn

2007-05-10T09:43:00.000-05:00

You may know how I feel about bottled water from my rant from last summer, but the article above takes this to a new level. Called "Lamest 'Value-Added' Products" it features plenty of bottled waters of various provenance, but also "the most expensive vodka in the world" (which the reviewers extol as "the greatest new use for your surplus cash since the money bonfire") and even a whole new category--ready-to-freeze ice cubes (tag line:"Ice that's not frozen").

If these people are actually making money, I think its about time to dust off my "dehydrated water" ~~scheme~~ concept (tag line: "All the water you'll ever need in the palm of your hand").

Anti-murderer Bias

2007-05-09T11:22:00.000-05:00

It seems that OJ Simpson was in a steakhouse in Louisville, Kentucky when he was approached for an autograph by another diner. The owner, who had had a picture of himself with Simpson among the celebrity photos on his wall before Simpson's wife and her friend were killed, asked Simpson to leave. Simpson said he understood and left quietly.

The owner later explained:

"I didn't want to serve him because of my convictions of what he's done to those families," Jeff Ruby said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "The way he continues to torture the lives of those families ... with his behavior, attitude and conduct."

He went on to say that Simpson's exit was the first classy thing he's done since 1994.

The patrons at the restaurant applauded the owner after Simpson left.

Incredibly, Simpson's attorney played the race card, thereby proving that just about anyone (who is a minority) can do so for almost any reason:

Simpson's attorney, Yale Galanter, said the incident was about race, and he intended to pursue the matter and possibly go after the restaurant's liquor license.

Finally, the attorney gives us a quote that gets my vote for "Absolute Worst Quote on Behalf of an Accused Murderer":

"He screwed with the wrong guy, he really did."

The End of War

2007-04-27T16:55:00.000-05:00

I ran across this article this week by a guy named Tony Long about the nature of war given the brutal effectiveness of today's weapons. After quoting Churchill about the squalor of modern war and noting that there's no going back to ancient times with less powerful weaponry, the author gives us the only solution: eliminate war itself:

...going forward there is only one solution. War itself must be made obsolete and that means eliminating the reasons men wage war: nationalism, religion, greed. But it will never happen, not in my lifetime or in yours, because that means 1.) abandoning the concept of the nation-state 2.) abolishing all religion 3.) replacing stock-market, corporate capitalism with universal socialism. It requires nothing less than a reinvention of the human condition. Imagine.

This is a line of thought that is simply amazing to me. This guy actually believes that the solution to man's geopolitical problems is an empire that destroys/absorbs all nation-states, abolished all religions, and brings socialism to all. Oh wait, we've already seen that--it was called the Soviet Union! I'll go out on a limb and say that veterans of that 70-year experiment wouldn't describe it as any kind of nirvana. Of course war is a terrible thing, but even the horrific toll Nazi Germany exacted on the USSR in World War II pales in comparison to the millions of lives taken in internal purges of its own people by various Soviet leaders.

I guess I can't expect anything different; this is the same deep thinker who inspired a post on this blog last year with his article about how the solution to the problems with the press is have the government license and pay all media outlets.

Ah, socialism. It works so well until you actually see it in action.

Treating You Dead or Alive

2007-04-27T16:40:00.000-05:00

It seems that a publicly-funded hospital in Ireland certified a disabled man in his 30s as dead, but when the morticians arrived to pick up his body he was still occupying it, apparently awake and alert. The hospital suffers from chronic overcrowding and recently from nurse strikes which seek more pay for less hours. But, never fear--a committee has been formed to investigate which will probably fix everything.

If you are think that the US needs to provide health care for all, this is yet another example of the horrors of free medical care. And if you're upset about rich Americans getting better care than than the poor, consider this: do you think that wealthy Irish patients go to this hospital which is accidentally not killing people? I'll bet there are more expensive places you can be treated, and if not you can fly to another country if you've got that kind of money. The US system definitely needs work, but sending it down this path is the wrong idea.

I Scratch My Head in Salute

2007-04-20T18:27:00.000-05:00

The link above features a letter to the editor from Arkansas that attacks Congress for exacerbating global warming by starting Daylight Savings Time early, thus adding an hour of daylight for an extra month. It kind of makes sense if you take it at face value as the worst attack EVER on global-warming theorists. Maybe the author thinks that Miss America is actually bringing us world peace, as well. However, perhaps it is sarcastically attacking conservative global-warming-doubters by making light of their alleged position and simultaneously labeling them as loose-screw right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Maybe I'm just tired, but the more I try to think about what the author was actually thinking the closer my head gets to actually exploding. I have decided that this may be the most confusing three paragraphs ever written by someone other than a lawyer, poet, or addict.

Plus, there's a typo by the editor in the headline.

Enjoy!

Racism and Hypocrisy by Reverends

2007-04-16T15:29:00.000-05:00

In the light of Don Imus' racist "jokes" and subsequent firing, racism is on the front pages again. Not coincidentally, America's racial reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are on the front pages again.

The blog post above (here or click on the title bar) brings up some history on Sharpton and Jackson that you might not know, including their documented antisemitism. That's right, both alleged purveyors of racial harmony have some special nicknames for Jewish people, and Sharpton in particular seems to have incited antisemitic riots that have led to the deaths of eight innocent people. Another quote from the entry has interesting echoes of the recent Duke lacrosse scandal (in which Sharpton also had plenty to say):

The good “reverend” Al Sharpton has a history of using racial attacks to further his cause. As noted in the 2003 column by Jeff Jacoby, in 1987 Sharpton spread a hoax that a 15-year-old black girl was “abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men.” Sharpton singled out one particular white man, saying, “If we’re lying, sue us, so we can . . . prove you did it.” The man does sue and wins $345,000.

Hopefully you weren't taking either of these guys too seriously before--when you start fathering illegitimate children (as Jackson has) nobody should call you "Reverend"--but this puts their self-serving racial ambulance-chasing in a new light.

If you think I'm being too harsh, check out this dead-on column by Jason Whitlock. Whitlock is a black sports columnist whose take on racial issues I don't always appreciate, but he provides some much-needed perspective on the damage Imus did versus the ongoing work of gangsta rappers. He says this:

Rather than confront this heinous enemy [hip hop that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture] from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

Let me say that I join everyone on the planet in condemning Imus' comments. I think misogyny and mocking of a person's natural physical traits (whether or not those traits are shared by an entire racial group) are asinine and symptomatic of a tiny mind. However, I completely agree with Whitlock that Imus' comments aren't even in the neighborhood of the worst commentary of that type today. As Whitlock says:

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?
When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset.

Al Sharpton has been all over Imus, but if he really cares about the problems facing black people today he should mount a campaign against the poison infecting todays hop-hop culture.

Hitler, Time's Man of the Year

2007-04-09T16:54:00.000-05:00

I had a discussion yesterday with Friend of the Brink Travis, who informed me that Adolf Hitler was Time magazine's Man of the Year before World War II. I was incredulous, so I had to track it down, and it seems that Adolf was the Man in 1938.

However, it seems that the Man of the Year was given in respect of Hitler's ascension to power and subsequent importance in Europe, but certainly not as glowing praise. Hitler was viewed with deep suspicion and was viewed as a monster on the rise. Time devoted most of the article to a recap of recent events in Germany and on the world stage, and closed with this ominous and prescient quote:

To those who watched the closing events of the year it seemed more than probable that the Man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered.

click the headline above to read the Time cover story...

So...Many...Colors

2007-03-30T18:38:00.001-05:00

OK, this is not the kind of stuff I usually post in this space, but this is a must-see for you artistic types. What we have here is a tool called Kuler that lets you peruse, design, and share color combinations. You can tag them with names like Ocean or Angry, or search for other people's ideas that have been so tagged.

I plan to use this for color palette ideas for web sites. You may want to use it to plan your kitchen.

So, whatever. Go crazy. Make something Kuler.

As always, click on the header for the external link...

Time Machine: Clinton Fires 93 Attorneys

2007-03-16T11:07:00.000-05:00

In the midst of another Bush-flogging scandal over the "political" firings of 8 US attorneys, the mainstream media has failed to recall an eerily similar news item which ought to be extremely relevant. In 1993, new President Bill Clinton fired 93 US attorneys. That's right, Clinton fired all of the US attorneys.

Considering the inquisition that Bush's Attorney General Albert Gonzalez is undergoing, you'd think that Janet Reno would have undergone almost 12 times as much criticism given the fact that she fired almost 12 times as many. But it seems that there was--comparatively speaking-- barely a peep. Apparently it just wasn't considered to be that big of a deal back then. Why? Well, I hate to accuse the media of bias, but it couldn't seem to be more clear in this case.

And as for today's scandal, it's not that nobody that would know is around.

ABC brought on George Stephanopoulos – who defended the Clinton firings as the White House spokesman in 1993 – to describe this as an urgent matter putting pressure on Karl Rove to testify before Congress and for Gonzales to resign!

Most of the electorate (including myself) is unable to weigh the allegations of "politicization" in the Justice Department because we don't know what is acceptable. Do those attorneys serve, like the Attorney General, at the pleasure of the President? We're hearing about how the AG should have some "independence". The man on the street doesn't have the answers to these questions, and it's easy to assume from the media frenzy that these allegations have weight.

However, if independence in an AG is so important, wasn't John F. Kennedy's tapping his own brother Robert as his Attorney General a terrible breach of protocol, at best? And if Bush's firing of 8 US attorneys was bad, wasn't Clinton's firing of 93 US Attorneys much, much worse? And here's another question: rather than sacrificing Gonzalez, as appears imminent, why is the White House not defending itself with the above information? Correction: A few news outlets, mostly in the Mid-South, are carrying this AP story: Rove defends removal of prosecutors, cites Clinton-era dismissals.

And why am I not getting the full story from the press?

Click the headline for the full story...

New Documentary Attacks...Michael Moore

2007-03-13T17:52:00.000-05:00

As documentary filmmakers, Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine looked up to Michael Moore.

Then they tried to do a documentary of their own about him -- and ran into the same sort of resistance Moore himself famously faces in his own films.

The result is "Manufacturing Dissent," which turns the camera on the confrontational documentarian and examines some of his methods. Among their revelations in the movie, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the South by Southwest film festival: That Moore actually did speak with then-General Motors chairman Roger Smith, the evasive subject of his 1989 debut "Roger & Me," but chose to withhold that footage from the final cut.

Click the headline for the rest of the story...

Upgrading Humans?

2007-03-13T17:41:00.000-05:00

Darpa, the US government agency in charge of blue-sky, far out research, is working on technologies that will enhance the human body--strength, endurance, cognition, survivability, etc. They're constrained by unwillingness to endanger test subjects, which brings up some interesting questions. Looks like they've got some stuff I need to get my hands on...

As always, click the headline above for the full article...

End of the Mouse?

2007-03-13T17:27:00.000-05:00

Jeff Han was a New York University computer scientist minding his own business when inspiration suddenly struck. Looking at a water glass one day, he was intrigued by the way his fingers interacted with the glass and he hit on an idea to take touchscreen technology to a new level.
Word of his multi-touch interface reached last year's TED conference curator, Chris Anderson, who invited him to give a brief demo, sandwiched between other lengthier talks. Han was the surprise hit of the show and became a geek rock star overnight. Since then he's had a crazy year developing a company, Perceptive Pixel, with Phil Davidson, and has sold some of their first products to the CIA. He's back at TED this week by popular demand. -- from Wired.com -- click above for the full story

Hot Accessory for 14-year-olds: A Real Baby!

2007-02-27T13:53:00.000-06:00

"When my friends see my bump they say they wish they could have a baby, then three weeks later they're pregnant and don't know what to do.

"Teenage girls think babies are cute, but they forget the physical side of being pregnant, then having to give up your own childhood to look after a baby.

"It seems to be fashionable to get pregnant."

Family campaigners said her comments showed how the Government's sex education policy had left teens with the "ridiculous but extremely worrying" misconception that having a child was no different to getting a new handbag.

The father of the pregnant British 14-year-old quoted above blamed the rise in underage pregnancies on "gang culture", media influence, parents, schools and the local authority, concluding that "it's a social problem". The mother blamed her daughter for the situation.

It seems to me that we should spend less time teaching children to "be true to themselves" and more time teaching kids the difference between right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, and smart decisions and stupid ones.

click above for the full story...

Little Dancer Boy

2007-02-27T13:39:00.000-06:00

This one is for the Official Sister of the Brink, a player of Dance Dance Revolution and a pincher of the cheeks of five-year-olds.

Texas GOP Seeks National Voice

2007-02-26T14:38:00.000-06:00

This one goes out to official Friend of the Brink Tom, as pertaining to our conversation about party politics and the fact that it has no direct connection with actual legislative action.

The article describes a new event to be held this summer and open to past participants in Republican State Conventions. These former delegates will gather, listen to GOP presidential candidates, and then vote on them in a completely meaningless election--except to the candidates, who will surely trumpet a positive finish in the "straw poll" to residents and media on other states to bolster their campaigns. It is an attempt by the Texas Republican Party to influence a national election.

Like the conventions themselves there is no legislative significance to this event, but there will be plenty of political significance if it leads to a change in the national perceptions of candidates jockeying for the highest office in the land.

click the headline above for the article...

Bible, Meet Web

2007-02-26T13:58:00.000-06:00

Speaking of the Bible, here's a cool, free site that has the whole thing--readable, searchable, and in several versions. So the next time you need to know if a phrase like "Spare the rod, spoil the child" is from the Bible you know where to turn. (It isn't.)

Click on the title above to go to the site...

Longevity and the Bible

2007-02-26T13:38:00.000-06:00

An interesting article here positing the theory that, as God decreed the maximum age of humanity to be 120 years in the book of Genesis, the ages given in subsequent genealogies drop significantly (but not immediately) due to a supernatural adjustment to their DNA which is still measurable today.

Notable for, if nothing else, the ages compiled from the Bible showing spectacular lifespans (900+ years) of early humans dropping significantly toward more familiar lengths.

click on the title above for the full article...

What Science Doesn't Know

2007-02-26T13:31:00.000-06:00

Wired Magazine's current issue (February 07) has a very interesting cover story about the limits of current scientific knowledge. As I read it I realized that the gaps in our scientific knowledge receive very little press, while scientific achievements are shouted from the mountaintops. While this is certainly understandable, it's good to realize the very real limits of what we know.

click the headline for the full story...

Secular Humanism: Defined

2007-02-26T13:26:00.000-06:00

Secular Humanism is the dominant western viewpoint of our day--but what is it, exactly? This question is answered in detail, with quotes from humanists and a bibliography, by the attached article.

click the title above for the article...

Dolly The Cloned Sheep Died Young

2007-02-23T16:09:00.000-06:00

Am I the only one who missed this? Dolly, the famous sheep product of cloning, died young of a disease that usually afflicts older animals and was found to have aged prematurely... Hmm. Maybe cloning is still a bit more complicated than we thought.

click on title for the full story...

This Just In: President Found on Dollar

2007-02-15T18:26:00.000-06:00

After two failed attempts to interest the American public in dollar coins, the U.S. Mint is getting away from female/native American empowerment icons (Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea) and going back to the well with two proven formulas: 1) A huge series of collectible designs and 2) dead presidents.

Will it work? Will America make room in its pockets for a different type of change? Will we flip for this new coin? Only time will tell.

Click on headline for the full story...

Cat Nurses Puppy; Nature v. Nurture Debate Erupts

2007-02-15T12:51:00.000-06:00

A 6-day-old Rottweiler puppy rejected by its mother and taken in by the Humane Society has been adopted by a family of cats. Treated as a brother by the kittens and a kitten by their mother, we here at The Brink hope that little Charlie will become a powerful advocate for his adopted species and known across the planet as the world's largest house cat. Alternatively, he will grow up to be a dog.

click headline for the full story...

Paradigm: The Story of the Creationist/Evolutionist

2007-02-13T13:26:00.000-06:00

A very interesting story here, and with some personal relevance: Dr. Michael Dini, who made national news for refusing to write letters of recommendation for graduate study for creationist students, is referenced in this story and has come up in discussions with friends recently.

KINGSTON, Rhode Island : There is nothing much unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at the University of Rhode Island.

His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is "impeccable," said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Ross's dissertation adviser. "He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework."

But Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a "young earth creationist" — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one "paradigm" for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, "that I am separating the different paradigms."

For the rest of this story click on the headline above...

Underwater Logging

2007-02-02T11:38:00.000-06:00

It turns out logging has sunk to a new low, literally speaking: harvesting underwater trees. Turns out that there is billions of dollars of lumber preserved under lakes made by dams, and one company has designed an underwater remote-controlled logging robot to go get them. As an added bonus, there is no forest wildlife or neighbors to disturb, and since the trees are dead anyway it's a home-run with conservation activists. The wood can be sold for a premium as "green", environment friendly, and it turns out it's actually cheaper to harvest this way. Gotta love free enterprise. (Click the headline above for the full story.)

Dilbert: The Knack

2007-01-24T17:18:00.000-06:00

I think I have a light case of The Knack. (Thanks to David for the Dilbert email)

Update: Sony made YouTube take the video down, but you can still see a longer version here...

Ladies Love Donuts

2007-01-19T13:59:00.000-06:00

I have previously featured a column by The Sports Gal, the long-suffering wife of super-fan and ESPN.com writer Bill "The Sports Guy" Simmons. He writes a weekly column, and she writes a smaller one to go with it every week. Here's another of her works I thought was hilarious. As a bonus, click on the title above to see all of her columns for the year.

We've been driving to the Staples Center for Clippers games for three seasons and Bill is constantly trying to figure out the quickest way. Each time he finds a better route, he spends the next three trips fine-tuning it and timing himself. I'm usually sitting in the passenger seat feeling nauseous from the quick turns, stop-and-go traffic, brake-slamming and swearing. But one day, Bill's quest for the fastest route paid off: we passed the motherload of donut shops, California Donuts. I've always loved donuts even though they're evil, but there aren't any good places out here -- we don't have a Krispy Kreme near us, there's just a Winchell's (generic) and a place called Yum Yum (which sounds like a place I'd find Bill reading porn in the curtained-off section). We desperately need a Dunkin' Donuts in L.A. but you knew this already.

The reason California Donuts caught my eye was because it had one of those really cool retro California signs. (I've always had good luck when a restaurant has a good sign, with one exception: Bob's Big Boy, which apparently serves prison food.) So one night I telepathically convinced Bill to think it was his idea and he stopped at California Donuts. When we got up to the window (yes, there's a window like at an ice cream shop) we were speechless. There was this huge deli case display of at least 30 different donuts that all looked like gourmet treats. I actually gasped out loud when I saw it. We opted for two apple fritters, a buttermilk and two glazed. They were so good that even the Olsens would have eaten them. I ripped through two and a half in about 10 minutes and then felt like I was pregnant for the next 36 hours. That was when I decided we could never go there again unless we were having a party and I wanted to serve them as dessert and pretend I made the fritters myself.

About three weeks later, Bill came home from a Clippers game with someone else and had six California Donuts with him. I was furious at him -- again, donuts are pure evil -- but that didn't stop me from shoving down a buttermilk in five bites like a hungry "Survivor" contestant who just won a food reward. Then Bill got mad that I was mad and said he'd throw the rest out, but we decided he should hide them instead so I couldn't find them. I couldn't bear the thought of those beautiful donuts sitting in the garbage. It just seemed wrong. The next day, I started thinking about the donuts and within a few minutes I was ripping apart the kitchen like a cop during a drug bust. I looked for them for a solid hour and a half in every part of the house. When Bill came home, I was completely frantic and screamed, "WHERE ARE THE DONUTS!" at him and I think he thought I was going to attack him.

The point is, I can't handle myself around these donuts. Now we've settled on establishing a "donut night" once a month so we don't end up weighing a combined 400 bills. And the reason I'm telling you this is because Donut Night is coming up next Wednesday. In my opinion, this is much more exciting than the Patriots-Colts game.

Run, Boy, Run!

2007-01-17T15:00:00.000-06:00

This one goes out to David and Curt, who believe I should be posting more =-)

Check out the new version of Honda's ASIMO (pronounced Awesome-O). He runs, with his feet actually leaving the ground for 0.08 seconds on each stride. A great technical achievement to be sure, but watching this little guy go I can't help but feel that the state of the art in modern robotics surely would be a disappointment to all the little kids in the '50s who envisioned aircars in every skygarage and robots in every home by now.

It's Not WHAT You Know...

2007-01-17T11:45:00.000-06:00

Ah, politics. Here's an update on the goings-on in our nation's capitol as the Democrats start the new session in control of Congress...

Sorry, Charlie!

By Denise McNamara, Republican National Committee

It was a simply a mistake, said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as she was confronted regarding the curious omission of the U.S. territory American Samoa in the new minimum wage hike legislation. Never mind that all of the other U.S. territories were included in the bill. Never mind that StarKist employs 75% of the residents of American Samoa. Oh, and it’s sheer coincidence that the owner of StarKist, Del Monte Foods, Inc., just happens to be in Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district. Sorry, Nancy, but we aren’t falling for that one hook, line, or sinker.

Democrats, who are fond of accusing Republicans of being in the pocket of big corporations, should be ashamed. Americans, who are tired of scandal and corruption and politics as usual, should be outraged. And Pelosi, who pulled this stunt in her first week as Speaker, should apologize to the hard-working people of American Samoa.

Speaker Pelosi has looked into the cameras and denied, with a straight face, that this legislation was purposely written to exempt American Samoa. Charlie, the iconic cartoon tuna in the ‘60s StarKist commercials was known for saying that he had “good taste.” Unfortunately, this type of behavior from the Speaker of the House does not leave a good taste in the mouth of voters.

State of the Nation

2006-10-20T18:09:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting take on the pre-election mood of the country.

Despite their dreams of recapturing one or both houses of Congress this November, the Democrats seem determined to reprise their poor showings of 2002 and 2004. Now, as then, they are dozing in the campaign's homestretch, like Aesop's hare, lulled by rosy predictions and the premature applause of Hollywood and the mainstream press. Soon, however, they may awake to discover that while they snoozed before the finish line, George W. Bush hunkered down in his tough shell, kept his slow legs moving and inched them out.

Chicago Tribune: The Tortoise and those Democratic Hares

The Old News Cycle

2006-10-20T17:43:00.000-05:00

I'm always fascinated by the following cycle of events:

Media focuses on victims, activists and media hounds making shrill cries for government intervention in the crisis of the day
Events run their course and the problem fades away
Complete lack of apology or correction regarding overreaction on the part of the media, which is back to step 1 on the new crisis of the day

I found a great article that gets into this phenomenon in detail. Here are some excerpts:

The Dow’s up and oil’s down. And it all seems to have happened so quickly. Just a few weeks back the talk was of doom and gloom, as the price of gas kept inching up above 3 bucks a gallon? Funny how quickly those who swore that the bad days had arrived for good have disappeared from sight! (Well, maybe not so funny if you believed them and sold your stocks before the rally.)

It also talks in depth about the cycles in today's public arena:

It has to do with cycles. There are generally three time cycles that compel political action: Economic cycles, political cycles and news cycles. Each cycle has its own momentum and its own set of consequences. When something shocking happens, like a war or a natural disaster, politicians and the media usually panic. And at no time in our history have news cycles and political cycles moved faster than they do today.

Good stuff.

Fox News: The Free Market Knows Best...Again

League of Dorks

2006-10-08T22:34:00.000-05:00

In a previous post about fantasy football I wrote about some of the joys of fantasy football. However, those of us who play fantasy football know the dark side of the game: wives and girlfriends tend to hate it with the heat of a thousand suns.

I remembered this when I saw a sidebar of a Sports Guy article written by his wife, the Sports Gal. She has taken the general disgust shared by most wives and girlfriends toward fantasy sports (in this case fantasy baseball) and expresses it in one handy package. I present it here for three reasons:

To show the Wife of the Brink that I understand how she feels, since I am featuring a story that perfectly communicates her thoughts.
This guy is totally obsessed, so I think she'll be impressed with how reasonable my fantasy habit really is.
It's pretty funny.

Here it is:

Bill and his friend Hench own a fake baseball team together. I call it the League of Dorks. It's hard to say how much time they spend on it, but I'd guess five hours a week, maybe more. Hench is one of Bill's nicest friends, but he's even nuttier about this stuff than Bill. One time, I peeked over Bill's shoulder as he was reading a bullet-pointed e-mail from Hench about their fake team. It was like a legal document, I couldn't believe it. Hench used to leave messages and not identify himself, you'd just hear, "message No. 1" and then Hench complaining about something that happened with their fake team. He wouldn't even say, "Hey, guys, this is Hench" first. So I made Bill get a second phone line just for Hench's calls -- they call it the "Bat Phone." I can't believe I married someone who needed a second phone line to talk about a fake baseball team.
You'd think the extra line was enough, but no. A couple of weeks ago, Bill and I were driving home from somewhere and trying to figure out something. Bill said, "I bet Hench knows," and before I knew it, he was calling Hench and they were talking about the League of Dorks. And I was trapped in the car listening to them. It was like being at the nail salon when everything's quiet and relaxing, then something happens and the nail ladies all start screaming in another language. I have no idea what they're talking about, but they're agitated and talking in annoying voices and it's not relaxing at all. That's what Bill and Hench sounded like. Actually, this was worse because I can understand the language and still can't understand them. Finally, I got mad and told Bill to hang up or I was going to jump out of the car.
This week, I noticed playoff baseball started, so I asked Bill, "What happened with the League of Dorks?" Bill said they won first prize. He didn't even seem happy about it. He was just relieved that they didn't lose. Then he said he's having a celebratory lunch with Hench next week. I said they should order a bottle of fake champagne and fake pour it on each other. I hate the League of Dorks.

I have to say a couple of things about this. First, husbands spend plenty of time listening to their wives talk about things that don't make sense to them. In fact, I have written this whole post while my wife talked with other women about weddings.

Secondly, just because something doesn't seem important to you doesn't mean it's a waste of someone else's time. For example, many men don't value crafts, decorations or talks about feelings very highly. By that of course I mean other men--I myself like to sit amongst decorations whilst making crafts and talking about my feelings and those of others.

But I'm just saying...

Fly Your Flag

2006-09-05T15:29:00.000-05:00

I'm not usually a big forwarder of emails, but this one is worth your time:

Email immediately to everyone in your address book asking them to also forward it. We have a little less than one week and counting to get the word out all across this great land and into every community in the United States of America. If you forward this email to least 11 people and each of those people do the same...you get the idea.

THE PROGRAM IS THIS:

On Monday, September 11th, 2006, an American flag should be displayed outside every home, apartment, office, and store in the United States. Every individual should make it their duty to display an American flag on this fifth anniversary of our country's worst tragedy. We do this in honor of those who lost their lives on 9/11, their families, friends and loved ones who continue to endure the pain, and those who today are fighting at home and abroad to preserve our cherished freedoms.

In the days, weeks and months following 9/11, our country was bathed in American flags as citizens mourned the incredible losses and stood shoulder-to-shoulder against terrorism. Sadly, those flags have all but disappeared. Our patriotism pulled us through some tough times and it shouldn't take another attack to galvanize us in solidarity. Our American flag is the fabric of our country and together we can prevail over terrorism of all kinds.

Action Plan: So, here's what we need you to do...

(1) Forward this email to everyone you know (at least 11 people). Please don't be the one to break this chain. Take a moment to think back to how you felt on 9/11 and let those sentiments guide you.

(2) Fly an American flag of any size on 9/11. Honestly, Americans should fly the flag year-round, but if you don't, then at least make it a priority on this day.

Thank you for your participation. God Bless You and God Bless America.

filed: etcetera

The End of Independent Media

2006-08-31T10:49:00.000-05:00

I got pretty exercised reading an article today by a left-wing journalist named Tony Long to the point that I felt it necessary to rant against it. I composed a great answer to his ill-taken points, and then their site's comment engine was down so I couldn't post it. Obviously, I came here next.

Here's the article:

Wired News: Time to Rake a Little Muck

Read it first, in all its irritating glory. He agrees with Al Gore about the scourge that is concentrated corporate media ownership; he lists problems with today's journalists like fake-story scandals and lack of talent, tenacity and guts; he sees problems with the "anarchic" internet media, and he sees 9/11 as the catalyst for years of media "groveling" at the feet of the Bush administration. His solution? Break up the conglomerates, a la Ma Bell, and remove the "vulgar need to turn a profit" from journalism (because the press is so important to our free society) by having the government license and pay all media outlets, thus allowing journalists to work from their principles instead of pandering for money.

So here's what I have to say about that:

OK, so the problem with media is too much centralization, so the solution is putting the government in charge of licensing and financing everything? Are you really naive enough to think that if the government licenses and pays everyone who reports on them that they would not exert control? This is not a new idea: it's the rage in every totalitarian state I can think of.

Another problem is that if you remove the profit motive from the press, you will reduce their product to the level we have come to expect from most government bureaucracies--a 9-to-5, "that's not my job", "I don't care if you're standing in line I'm taking my break" mentality that is bound to occur when you separate performance from reward. Under this scenario you would see far fewer talented reporters than you do now, since talented people will gravitate to a profession where their skills will be recognized and compensated. For an example of this situation, see the US public school system.

Finally, your "anarchy" argument--in this case that too many choices in online media are harmful--is a permutation of the same basic problem that Marx had with capitalism. He saw that many workers would be displaced if market forces were allowed to run free. But he did not recognize the tremendous prosperity that would result from a system tailored directly to the needs of the market, and that workers (themselves consumers, of course) would greatly benefit from capitalism in spite of the anarchy built in to the system.

In the same way, while the new media endangers jobs of people like you, it has already given the consumers of news a better product by keeping established journalists on their toes (see Dan Rather), and I believe that it will continue to grow into a form more tailored to the public's needs.

P.S. You say it's not about being objective. I agree that it is difficult to be objective, but a reporter is supposed to at least present both sides of a story. I believe that biased reporting is an important reason that people are leaving old media outlets and looking for something more in line with their perspectives.

Thank you, and good night.

filed: etcetera

Border Showdown Leads to Prison

2006-08-29T14:00:00.000-05:00

EL PASO, Texas - Border Patrol Agent Ignacio Ramos could hear his heart racing. He could feel the dry, hot dust burning against his skin as he chased a drug trafficker trying to flee back into Mexico.
Ramos' fellow agent, Jose Alonso Compean, was lying on the ground behind him, banged up and bloody from a scuffle with the much-bigger smuggler moments earlier.
Suddenly the smuggler turned toward the pursuing Ramos, gun in hand. Ramos, his own weapon already drawn, shot at him, though the man was able to flee into the brush and escape the agents.
Now, nearly 18 months after that violent encounter, Ramos and Compean are facing 20 years in federal prison for their actions.
Why?
According to the U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted the agents, the man they were chasing didn't actually have a gun, shooting him in the back violated his civil rights, the agents didn't know for a fact that he was a drug smuggler, and they broke Border Patrol rules about discharging their weapons and preserving a crime scene.

You read that correctly. The drug smuggler (who was given immunity and testified against the agents at trial) escaped back across the border with his 800 pounds of marajuana, but the border guards are looking at hard time. Plus, it turns out that the agents broke policy by chasing the smuggler in the first place because "The Border Patrol pursuit policy prohibits the pursuit of someone."

Amazing.

DailyBulletin.com: Convicted Border Agent Tells His Story

If you're as ticked off as I am about this, you can sign a petition for President Bush to pardon these agents here.

filed: politics

Zoom it Yourself

2006-08-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

You know on CSI when they zoom and zoom and zoom into the picture and catch the perp doing whatever he does, and then they run his picture through the database and find him using his phone and catch him while he's sleeping? Now you can do this too--at least the zooming part.

It seems a photographer took tons of super-zoomed pictures using a digital camera, used special hardware to stitch it together into a huge, huge format picture, and then put it on the web. The result lets you look at a panorama of a harbor in Sydney and click on any spot in the picture to zoom repeatedly until you can clearly see pedestrians and dinner parties enjoying their meals in seaside restaurants.

Pretty cool.

Docbert.org: Sydney By Night

filed: etcetera

Fantasy Football

2006-08-05T12:22:00.000-05:00

Alright everybody, it's that time of year again: Fantasy Football time! Some of you may think that fantasy owners are the type of people who have no real lives and sit around during the offseason pining for football and making lime helmets for their cats.

While there may be some truth to that, I am happy to call your attention to the poet laureate of sports nerds, Bill Simmons, who may be able to change your opinion. Known as The Sports Guy, Simmons is an inveterate sports fanatic who also possesses encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture past and present and is equally comfortable (and unembarrassed) discussing the 1988 Celtics and plot arcs of Beverly Hills 90210. In short, he makes nerdiness seem cool. Check out this quote from his 2006 NBA Draft Diary:

10:20 -- The Mavs take Maurice Ager at No. 28...Ager walks up to the stage in a triple-breasted, oversized beige suit, goes to shake hands with Stern and immediately gets whistled for a foul on Dwyane Wade.

It's funny 'cause it's true.

Anyway, back to fantasy football. Simmons fantasy football article is some really good stuff. He offers hints on everything from getting rid of deadbeat fantasy owners (a very unique "three strikes and you're out" rule) to spicing up the deadline trade market (tequila shots).

We have so much to learn.

ESPN.com: The New Fantasy Rules

filed: sports

My Contribution to the Gene Pool

2006-07-28T01:09:00.000-05:00

"I hope our kids are as smart as me when I was little and not like you, trying to dig to China with a stick and thinking 'an' and 'and' are the same word.

But I do hope they have your eyelashes."

--The Official Wife of The Brink, excerpted from a conversation about her early childhood development and briefly touching on mine. I must, however, point out that in adulthood both my digging and spelling have far surpassed hers so I think that I have plenty to offer our future spawn besides the obvious dazzling handsomeness.

filed: quotes; humor

Bottled Water, Anyone?

2006-07-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

OK, this is for you, my friends with whom I have argued about the benefits of bottled water. To recap, the argument goes like this:

Me: I can't believe Americans spend 4 bazillion dollars a year on a product that is available in their homes for a fraction of a cent.
Misguided Friends: Ughh, I can't believe you drink that stuff! Tap water is so gross!
Me: Bottled water IS tap water.
Misguided Friends: Nu-uh! It's, like, the nectar of the gods!

Exhibit A is a two-year-old piece from The Guardian. It tells the story of a series of PR blows in Britain to Dasani, Coke's bottled water brand. It seems that Dasani was found to be tap water. Then the "highly sophisticated purification process" used to process it was discovered to be reverse osmosis. Finally, it turns out that one of the additives that go into Dasani (for taste) interacted with the ozone that is pumped through it and formed levels of a cancer-causing compound called bromate that were twice the legal level. So of course Coca-Cola was forced to recall the poisonous Dasani.

Now perhaps you think that I'm going to go down the "SEE, BOTTLED WATER CAN KILL YOU!" road. No indeed. As even The Guardian noted:

The legal limits are set to have a wide margin of safety, and the Food Standards Agency advice yesterday was that while Dasani contained illegal levels of bromate, it did not present an immediate risk to the public.

As we are often not told, there are tiny amounts of various poisons and contaminants from arsenic to insect legs in virtually everything we eat, drink and breathe. Below a certain level they don't really affect us and they would be prohibitively expensive, if not impossible, to remove. Legal limits are established in an attempt to codify an appropriate level, although as former President Clinton has shown, political games can be played with those limits as he allegedly did when, on his way out of office (January 22, 2001!) he lowered the legal amount of arsenic in drinking water by 80 percent, forcing President Bush to either leave it at the unnecessarily low levels or raise it back to where it was before and deal with accusations of poisoning the public ("BUSH RAISES ARSENIC LEVELS BY 500 PERCENT IN AN ATTEMPT TO KILL CHILDREN!!!").

Anyway, the point: Some, if not most, bottled water is tap water run through an reverse osmosis (RO) unit with additives for "taste profile". That is to say, it's a "taste profile" past what you can obtain at your kitchen sink for just a smidge more than free. Your bottled water costs about 1000 times more and comes in a disposable bottle that's headed to the landfill instead of using the extremely reliable and efficient water delivery system that is already in your house.

Bottom line: get used to the taste or buy yourself an RO system, because it's the economically and environmentally right choice.

Thank you.

filed: etcetera

Rent-A-State

2006-07-17T20:14:00.000-05:00

Are you planning a corporate retreat, destination wedding or Bar Mitzvah? Are you trying to avoid the "same old thing"? Be the first among your friends to rent the entire European country of Liechtenstein!

That's right, for between $320 and $520 per person per day, your group of up to 1200 people can enjoy the "Heidi"-esque charms of a real microstate.

And if you're not into Heidi you can plaster your corporate logo everywhere, so that's cool.

The New York Times: For Rent: One Principality, Prince Not Included

filed: etcetera

Inner Space and the 11-Mile-Wide Web Page

2006-06-23T12:09:00.001-05:00

We've all heard about and dreamed of and watched movies about outer space, but here's a demonstration about the space inside us--inside the atoms that make up the molecules that make up our bodies and everything we see. It seems that if the proton of a hydrogen atom (which has only one proton in its nucleus and one electron orbiting around it) were the size of a basketball, it's electron would be the size of a period. Makes sense, right? However, the kicker is that, in its orbit around the proton, at any given time the electron would be 11 miles away.

Check out the link below for a graphic demonstration. The page is 11 miles wide.

Phrenopolis.com: Hydrogen Atom Scale Model

filed: science

Liberal Patriotism

2006-06-21T11:26:00.000-05:00

I often struggle to understand viewpoints that are different from my own, so I like to learn how people who disagree with me think. This article, by a former Time White House correspondent who once offered to perform sexual favors for President Clinton in exchange for his defense of abortion rights, definitely falls in that category.

The following quote was a headline on the story when I bookmarked it, but I can't find it anywhere now:

I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?

This New York City reporter ventures upstate and puts her son in the local school, with whose parents she does not fit in. She and her city friends worry about the education he'll receive in the God-and-country-loving small town. She contacts the ACLU over proselytizing in the school, her son's favorite colors become red, white and blue, and she talks about the mixed feelings she has for this country.

By the end, some things change and some stay the same. For you education buffs out there will love this quote about when the son goes back to a nice school in NYC:

He can, it turns out -- despite the warnings of other city parents -- read at a level twice that of his new peers.

Interesting stuff.

Salon.com: Country Boy

filed: us.politics

Tom Delay's Farewell Address

2006-06-19T09:12:00.000-05:00

Tom Delay delivered has last speech as a member of the House last week. Upbeat almost to the point of joyousness and extremely gracious to friend and foe, the speech raises some very interesting points about partisanship ("You show me a nation without partisanship, and I'll show you a tyranny.") which are almost ironic given the nature of the politically motivated attacks that lead to his retirement, yet completely in keeping with the way he played the game.

He speaks reverently of the history of our country and passionately about the sorry state our foster care system. Overall, an interesting and edifying discourse that reminds me of the good side of politics.

Republican Party of Texas: Tom Delay's Farewell Address

filed: politics.us

Electoral College Under Attack

2006-06-15T08:38:00.000-05:00

The much maligned Electoral College is under attack again by a group who believes that the nationwide popular vote should determine our presidency. Why is this a bad idea? This article makes some great points, and here's one for a start: imagine a regional candidate who is completely out of touch with the rest of the country. If the candidate happens to be from a very populous area, they might be able to win enough votes from their geographical base to completely ignore the objections of the rest of the country (especially in a race with multiple candidates).

Because the scenario above is unlikely under the Electoral College system, it discourages fractured multi-party elections with 20 candidates for a single office since most states require a successful candidate to win a significant percentage of votes in a that state, rather than rewarding candidates with less than 10 percent support in every state. If you think politics is frustrating now, imagine electing a president who received 9 percent of the vote.

Check out this article and find out the truth: our Founding Fathers actually knew what they were doing!

GinaParker.net: There They Go Again!

filed: us.politics

The Ipod's Problem

2006-06-14T11:11:00.000-05:00

We've read all of the articles praising the Ipod: Beautiful design, great features, world-changing business model, etc. But Paul Kedrosky has the gall to challenge the long-term wisdom behind Apple's design philosophy and by extension the vaunted KISS principle as well.

An interesting read, good points made, and extra points for swimming against the flow.

Business 2.0: Simple Minds

filed: business

How the Mafia Does Hockey

2006-06-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

Good to see Stephen representing on the comments. This one's for you.

In a real-life story ripped from The Sopranos, a regional garbage magnate and owner of a minor league hockey team called the Trashers has been arrested on charges of racketeering, extortion, witness tampering and circumventing the league's salary cap. (Is anybody but me curious about the official charge associated with circumventing a minor league's salary cap?)

The league issued a press release saying that they decided not to play next season because their closest rivals won't play next year because of a lease issue. However, the story notes:

The release does not mention that the Trashers are under federal indictment, that [the owner] Galante is in prison awaiting trial, that his family's bank accounts have been frozen or that federal marshals are working out of the building where the Trashers and Galante's garbage companies were based.

It seems that Galante has also been paying "Matty the Horse" 10K per month for mob muscle to keep his garbage companies at the top of the heap, so to speak.

Do you ever get the feeling that reality has become a parody of HBO?

ESPN.com: UHL team cancels season after mob indictment

filed: sports; humor

The No-Cost Airline

2006-06-12T16:49:00.000-05:00

Ireland's RyanAir wants to be the "Wal-Mart of flying". They already offer a quarter of their passengers seats for free, with that number rising to half by 2010. How do they do it? For starters, they make low-cost, low-frills Southwest look like profligate spenders...

Business 2.0: A radical fix for airlines: Make flying free

filed: business

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Eliminated

2006-06-09T10:31:00.000-05:00

The man Osama Bin Laden called Al Qaeda's prince of Iraq is dead, bombed in a hideout by US F-16s and recovered by Iraqi and US forces. He was responsible for many attacks in Iraq, a hotel bombing in his homeland of Jordan, and it is believed that he personally beheaded two American hostages. A Sunni muslim, He had made it his business recently to kill Shiite muslims and desecrate their shrines in an effort to cause civil war in Iraq.

He was evil, and I can confidently report that he is enjoying neither the company of 70 virgins or the comfort of angels in the afterlife.

Washington Times: Zarqawi killed in U.S. Air Strike

filed: world.politics

Just That Crazy

2006-04-29T02:07:00.000-05:00

Obviously, this decision is wolf-face crazy. It's the kind of decision you make when you are drunk, and on cocaine, and on deadline, and on fire.

Chuck Klosterman, commenting on the unanticipated and much-panned move by the NFL's Houston Texans to draft someone other than Reggie Bush. This is the most strongly worded critique I have seen so far, by a rather large margin. It is also the first to mention wolf-faces.

filed: sports

Journalism and Personal Bias

2006-04-18T16:27:00.000-05:00

Journalists are supposed to report the news in a balanced fashion, reporting both sides of a story regardless of which one they agree with. That way, regardless of their own bias, they can still give the public a chance to make up it's own mind. I have long questioned the capacity of a biased individual to produce an unbiased report, but I ran into an blog entry that brought the problem sharply into focus.

In googling Richard Lindzen, the scientist whose Wall Street Journal global warming op-ed I blogged last week, I ran into a blog entry from CBS news. The author interviewed the people behind 60 Minutes' three pieces this season on climate change, including one that tied into Katrina. He notes that they "did not pause to acknowledge global warming skeptics, instead treating the existence of global warming as an established fact." The response: "If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?"

This is a good question. At some point in a public debate, the only people who haven't become convinced of the truth may be classified as kooks and the debate may be considered over. The debate over whether the Holocaust actually occurred has long since reached that point, and journalistic balance should not force a report to consider the dissenting "side".

However, the question as to whether a debate still exists is a judgment that must be made by a reporter. The people at CBS "tried hard to find a respected scientist who contradicted the prevailing opinion in the scientific community, but there was no one out there who fit that description." One would think that the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT would fit the bill, but Richard Lindzen was not quoted. So either the research team at CBS doesn't have the contacts that the Wall Street Journal does, or the decision was made that Lindzen was not a "respected scientist".

Therein lies the rub: even given their best efforts, today's big media outlets could not be unbiased because the job of a journalist requires judgment, and the personal views of most journalists lie far to the left of the average American's. So perhaps the exodus of mainstream media viewership to more conservative sources may be explained thusly to their mystified leaders: the "kooks" are leaving.

CBSNews.com Blog: ...Global Warming Coverage

filed: media; politics

How to Destroy America

2006-04-17T12:57:00.000-05:00

There is an interesting article that seems to be sweeping the internet in email and blogs. The article is a third-person account of a speech from late 2003 by Richard D. Lamm, former Democrat governor of Colorado. The author of the article (apparently one Frosty Wooldridge), judging by the commentary, believes that immigration is destroying America. The speech itself is not so much anti-immigration as anti-multiculturalist, speaking to the attitudes Americans have toward immigrants from other cultures.

I disagree with Frosty. As a country of immigrants, I'm not sure that we should view immigration as the poison that will destroy us. I agree with Governor Lamm that multiculturalism is the poison. The recent French riots bear this out. The rioters were immigrants whose families are poor because they are unassimilated, not because they are immigrants. As Lamm says below, "If we can put the emphasis on the 'pluribus' instead of the 'unum', we can balkanize America is surely as Kosovo."

Below is the speech by Lamm against multiculturalism: if you want the speech with the anti-immigration commentary you can find it at one of the first two links above.

I Have A Plan To Destroy America

Richard D. Lamm

I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, lets destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” Here is my plan:

I. We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. One scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset, put it this way:

The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon-all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans.

II. I would then invent “multiculturalism” and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal: that there are no cultural differences that are important. I would declare it an article of faith that the black and hispanic dropout rate is only due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out-of-bounds.

III. We can make the United States a “hispanic quebec” without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently:

...the apparent success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentrically, and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.

I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with a salad bowl metaphor. It is important to insure that we have various cultural sub-groups living in America reinforcing their differences rather than Americans, emphasizing their similarities.

IV. Having done all this, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated - I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50% drop out rate from school.

V. I would then get the big foundations and big business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and i would establish the cult of Victimology. I would get all minorities to think their lack of success was all the fault of the majority - I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population.

VI. I would establish dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties. I would “celebrate diversity.” “Diversity” is a wonderfully seductive word. It stresses differences rather than commonalities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other-that is, when they are not killing each other. A diverse,” peaceful, or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together, and we can take advantage of this myopia. Look at the ancient Greeks. Dorf’s world history tells us:

The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshiped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic Games in honor of Zeus and all Greeks venerated the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. A common enemy Persia threatened their liberty. Yet, all of these bonds together were not strong enough to overcome two factors . . . (local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions . . .)

If we can put the emphasis on the “pluribus,” instead of the “unum,” we can balkanize America as surely as Kosovo.

VII. Then I would place all these subjects off limits - make it taboo to talk about. I would find a word similar to “heretic” in the 16th century - that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like “racist”, “xenophobe” that halts argument and conversation.

Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of “Victimology”, I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra - “that because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good.” I would make every individual immigrant sympatric and ignore the cumulative impact.

VIII. Lastly, I would censor Victor Hanson Davis’s book Mexifornia — this book is dangerous — it exposes my plan to destroy America. So please, please — if you feel that America deserves to be destroyed — please, please — don’t buy this book! This guy is on to my plan.

”The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” — Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic.

Governor Lamm misidentifies the author of the book Mexifornia, whose correct name is Victor Davis Hanson. More info on the internet phenomenon of the Lamm speech is available at snopes.com.

filed: us.politics; world.politics

The Politics of Science: The Muzzling of Dissent

2006-04-12T22:37:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal printed an op-ed today by an MIT scientist who alleges that his climate-related research has been sandbagged when it disagrees with conventional "alarmist" scientific theory on global warming. He presents a well-documented yet accessible overview of the issues in question and levels some pretty strong charges at global warming propenents.

I haven't heard much besides bombast from both sides of this issue so I haven't had a strong opinion on it, but this cleared up a lot of things for me. It's a must read.

OpinionJournal.com: Climate of Fear

filed: science; politics

Necessity is their Mother...

2006-04-12T14:11:00.000-05:00

From the Remote Control to GPS to the Internet, Popular Mechanics gives us their top 50 inventions of our time--plus some interesting background on each one.

Popular Mechanics: Top 50 Inventions

filed: technology

Guest Feature: Lubbock in the Dark V: Drug Abuse

2006-04-07T08:06:00.007-05:00

Ruth Bradley is a crack reporter and an official Friend of the Brink. (Crack: adj; of superior excellence or ability. She is not on crack, nor does she report exclusively about crack.) She's got a five-part series on social issues in Lubbock, Texas running in the Texas Tech student paper, the Daily Toreador. We'll link to the articles, and we'll also run them here since you have to sign up to view them on the site.

A few days before his high school graduation, Steven Parkson decided to take a road trip. He often traveled to Lubbock from his home in Lake Travis to party with the fraternity he hoped to join one day.

Parkson said he remembers the drive well, remembers "drinking and drugging the whole way." He also remembers the accident.

Parkson crashed head-on into a single-cab pickup, totaling both vehicles and injuring the four passengers in the other vehicle.

"When I got in the back of that cop car, I was crying," said Parkson, a senior history and political science major. "It became real clear to me that there were serious consequences to your actions."

Violent incidents like this are highly correlated to drug abuse said Lisa Karnes, crime analyst for the Lubbock Police Department.

"When people use drugs, they don't think clearly and do other crimes," she said.

Tony Menchaca, a lieutenant in the criminal investigations department of the Lubbock Sheriff's Office, said use of illegal drugs greatly increases crime.

"Drug abuse is a nexus for just about every kind of crime you can imagine," he said.

It especially increases the violence of crimes, he said, and the aggression of the perpetrators. Because of this, drug abuse affects not just the abuser, but also the community as a whole.

"We have a pretty big drug problem here, and there's a great deal of money involved," he said. "And that's causing tons of problems."

Gilbert Arredondo, a sergeant in the Texas Department of Public Safety Narcotics Division, said narcotics officers are having particular problems with methamphetamines, because their users become addicted so quickly.

"You can't be a casual user of methamphetamine," he said. "You don't own it, it'll own you."

Other illegal drugs commonly sold in the Lubbock-area include cocaine and crack. Sometimes these are transported into Lubbock 10 or 15 tons at a time, Menchaca said.

"It's a humongous business, it really is," he said. "These guys are making tons of money."

And it seems to be growing.

"Our arrests and seizures for narcotics have probably tripled the last couple years," Arredondodo said.

The problem has become so large that the Lubbock Police Department Narcotics division no longer is able to do much in-depth work, Menchaca said. Instead, they are struggling to keep up with the calls that come in on a daily basis about problems in various neighborhoods.

"They don't have the time to do long-term investigations," he said.

The causes behind drug abuse are varied and complex. Mary Gerlach, behavioral health director for the Lubbock Regional Mental Health Mental Retardation Center, said some people begin abusing in an attempt to self-medicate mental problems, such as depression. Children who grew up in a home where abuse was accepted are more likely to become addicted as well, Gerlach said. And for many, drug abuse starts as an attempt to belong.

"While it's not an accepting peer group, it's the closest thing they ever have to one," Gerlach said.

For Parkson, who began experimenting with drugs at age 14, this was exactly what drugs offered.

"I always felt a little different," he said, recalling having trouble fitting in during his years in middle school. But the first time he got high, that feeling went away.

"I felt like it filled in my awkwardness," he said. "(It) kind of brought me out of my shell. I felt like it helped me to be me - whatever that was."

So Parkson continued to do drugs, experimenting with pot, mushrooms and other hallucinogens. Just a year after he first tried drugs, he started selling drugs to other students, and doing drugs on a daily basis.

"I loved being high," Parkson said. "I spent all my time trying to be high."

The feeling of being high becomes both a physical and a biological need, said George Comiskey, associate director for the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery.

"There's just a physiological energy that happens when they put a drug into their system," he said. "You want that feeling; you want that feeling over and over."

Comiskey said addiction is a combination of disorders, affecting health, emotions and social life.

"There's a part of them that says 'I can't live without this' - it's become their best friend," he said.

Finally, there comes a point where users no longer can control their needs.

"When you want to quit and you can't quit, you are officially addicted," Comiskey said.

Abusers often become even more dependant on drugs as the consequences of addiction begin to affect their lives.

Comiskey said addicts often take drugs not only to get high, but also to forget the emotional and relational problems caused by their actions. This is why so many former addicts go back to drugs, even after years of being clean.

"When life gets overwhelming, that drug is always out there as an option," Comiskey said.

After the wreck, Parkson said he constantly felt this need to feel better.

"I started taking pills, I started taking more drugs," he said. "I was just kind of on this merry-go-round, this cycle of addiction - it's kind of like self-hate."

In the midst of this, Parkson met his first serious girlfriend, and, eventually her father.

Parkson said her father became an important figure in his life, and he was convicted by this man's lifestyle and attitude.

"I felt really guilty around him, you know?" Parkson said. "Because my life wasn't right."

Because of his influence, Parkson said he became a Christian, began to attend church and quit drugs cold turkey. He was able to stay clean for six months, before he experienced a relapse, while drinking on his 21st birthday.

"I thought I could control it," he said.

The reawakening of his alcoholism quickly led to the reawakening of another old habit. Under stress from work and school, Parkson slipped back into drug abuse long enough to realize that he might need additional help.

He attended a local 12-step meeting, and spent time at Dove Tree Ranch and Faith Center, two private Lubbock rehabilitation centers.

But private treatment centers like this are scarce, and expensive in the Lubbock area, Gerlach said. The other alternative, state-funded treatment also is scarce, and the demand so high that applicants must often wait for weeks before they actually begin the program.

"So when they do get ready to get help they have to wait two to six weeks," she said.

By this time, many of them have gone back to their addictions.

"You've got to hit someone when they're ready, or they're not going to do anything," Gerlach said.

Although resources are limited because of funding cuts, Gerlach said MHMR does offer help to those who realize a need. The center provides a 24-hour crisis line at (806) 740-1414.

Gerlach said she'd like to see more rehabilitation centers and similar programs started in Lubbock, particularly for the youth. Currently, there are no treatment centers for juveniles in Lubbock.

"None of the private facilities see a need to open one up," she said.

The nearest youth rehabilitation center is in Plainview.

There is more help available for Texas Tech students, Comiskey said.

The Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery offers programs specifically designed to help students through education about the problem, and through accountability. The center can be contacted at (806) 742-2891.

More than anything, people trying to recover need support, Comiskey said.

"You really have to help them change their life," he said.

Since his recovery, this has been one of Parkson's goals - to encourage people who are now were he once was.

"I was taught that the Lord has given me a gift," he said. "And the only way to keep that gift is to give it away."

Since his recovery, Parkson has worked to help users, working with Lubbock's Adult Drug Court, which helps first-time felony offenders of drug-related crimes, and with Christ in Action to reach those struggling with drug abuse.

And, most importantly, he tells his story - a story he hopes will bring hope to others.

"It can be overcome," he said. "It doesn't have to be the end, it can be the beginning."

© Copyright 2006 Daily Toreador

Ruth wrote me to comment on her story; I include her comment here:

Dear Huevo,
One thing I was struck with about these stories is that, with the exception of the child abuse issue, in Lubbock at least, the only organizations that are able to help with these problems are church-based.
You and I were talking the other day about how many of these, especially homelessness, need to be handled on a case-by-case basis, because of their complexity. I think the church really is the only feasible way to deal with these, and moreover, it is the only way to really fix the problems.
I wasn't able to include this interveiw in my story, but one of the homeless men I talked to said, and I completely agree with him, that even if you can start programs to meet all these physical needs, it won't end the problems. The real problem is not drugs, or homelessness, or prostitution, those are the symptoms. The real problem is what these people really need is Jesus, because without Him there is no hope, no reason to live, and no reason to change.
The prostitute that I talked to, Anita, said the main reason she was on the street was she was looking for someone who truely cared about her -just for her. That was something she couldn't find at home, or on the streets, and truely, that's only something she's going to find in Christ.
That is the root of the need, and the real cry of these people.

note: Parkson's name has been changed here to protect his identity.

Guest Feature: Lubbock in the Dark IV: Racism

2006-04-06T11:31:00.000-05:00

Ruth Bradley is a crack reporter and an official Friend of the Brink. She's got a five-part series on social issues in Lubbock, Texas running in the Texas Tech student paper, the Daily Toreador. We'll link to the articles, and we'll also run them here since you have to sign up to view them on the site.

Eddie Richardson experienced the civil rights movement firsthand, watched as the vestiges of slavery disappeared from Lubbock. But, nearly 40 years later, he said the bigotry the movement fought to abolish remains.

"Racism is alive and well in Lubbock," he said. "And it's a lot more sophisticated racism than you'll find in a lot of places."

As the co-publisher of The Southwest Digest, a newspaper oriented toward the black community of Lubbock, Richardson has studied the history of his race in the town. Though signs of outright discrimination have vanished, Richardson said in some ways things really have not changed.

"Instead of calling your boy a n*gger, they'll call you son," Richardson said. "But the results are the same."

Richardson said he believes that old racist attitudes are forming anew in the upcoming generation, and that, combined with economic setbacks, is a large part of why many blacks in Lubbock have difficulty finding opportunities.

"Until the playing field is leveled," he said, "it will always be that way."

Blacks are not the only ethnic group dealing with racism. City Councilwoman Linda DeLeon, a member of the Hispanic community and another longtime resident of Lubbock, said many Hispanics in Lubbock face similar attitudes, particularly in the job market.

"I think there's still some lack of sensitivity," she said. "I think some people are still chosen by their ethnicity, instead of by their qualifications."

DeLeon, who travels regularly, said she has found many people outside Lubbock have similar views about the town.

"Lubbock has a reputation for racism," she said.

Christopher Blue, president of the African American Student Society, said part of this reputation might be Lubbock's location in a conservative part of the country. But where college students are concerned, he said another reason may be the low number of minorities at the school.

According to Texas Tech's Institutional Research and Information Management Web site at www.irim.ttu.edu, 878 blacks attended Tech in fall 2005, about 3 percent of the university's 28,001 students. Hispanic students formed approximately 10 percent of the student body, with 3,073 attending.

Comparable numbers at the University of Texas at Austin found at www.utexas.edu/academic/oir/ show close to a 4 percent enrollment for blacks and a 14 percent enrollment for Hispanics.

Crystal Ramirez, president of the Hispanic Student Society, said she believes these low enrollment numbers are partially due to a lack of emphasis on the recruitment of minorities at Tech.

Bidal Aguero, a Lubbock native and editor and publisher of El Editor, a Hispanic newspaper, said he believes Tech should be helping to spread diversity in other ways.

"I think that the university's not doing enough to show the different cultures that exist in our community," he said.

Demographics are not only a problem at Tech, Aguero said. North Lubbock is primarily populated by blacks, he said, while a large group of Hispanics has made their home in Northeast Lubbock.

"We can still see a lot of segregation," Aguero said.

The 2000 Census of Population and Housing at http://planning.ci.lubbock.tx.us shows that a majority of Hispanics and blacks do inhabit these areas. Hispanics appear to be more integrated into the community as a whole, the lowest percentage of Hispanics in a given area is 4.6 percent. Blacks, however, seem less integrated, with less than 1 percent of the population living South of 98th Street and a little more than 1 percent living in several midtown areas.

"A lot of it is the availability of the houses people can afford," Aguero said. "I guess you could also put a little blame on (the fact that) people want to be were they're liked and where they're welcomed."

Aguero, who grew up in Lubbock, said certain practices have changed, but he still feels unwelcome in certain places in Lubbock. And though signs prohibiting blacks and Hispanics from businesses are gone, he believes the attitudes behind them have sometimes remained.

Other things have remained, too.

In 1923, the city of Lubbock issued Ordinance No. 225, prohibiting persons with 1/8 or more black blood from living or owning property anywhere south of 16th Street and East of Avenue C, with the exception of hired servants. Violation of the ordinance was punishable by a fine of not more than $200, with each day lived outside the district considered a separate offense. The ordinance states that blacks living outside this area are a threat and that "their residence is dangerous to the health and pollutes the earth and atmosphere."

Jane McDaniel, assistant to the city secretary, said that there is no evidence that the ordinance was ever enacted. But Richardson said there was a time when blacks were forced, if not by law, at least by precedent, to stay on that side of town. Moreover, he said that even if the law was never enforced, the fact that the ordinance is still on the record troubles him.

"Lubbock should have the decency to have a meeting and take it off the record," he said.

He believes that by doing this, the city will be able to take a stance against the attitudes that once were so prevalent.

"It would show the heart of the city," he said.

Richardson's business partner, T.J. Patterson, said the ordinance and others like it in other cities helped plant the seeds of racism during that time period, seeds that brought about racist mindsets in following generations.

"Segregation was a national word," said Joan Y. Ervin, a native of Lubbock.

Ervin recalls the times of forced segregation and said she now chooses to live in the part of town where people of her race were once forced to stay. She believes the situation in Lubbock have improved dramatically.

"There has been a complete change - a shift in knowledge because of intelligence," she said.

Erwin said it is important for people of all races to prepare themselves to be qualified to serve as pathfinders in their community. She said she is proud of her own accomplishments in Lubbock, namely becoming the first black to serve on the University Medical Center's Hospital Board of Managers.

But perhaps her greatest achievement was accomplished while serving on the school board beginning in 1970. The first black and first woman elected to public office in Lubbock, Ervin helped create and enact a plan to integrate Lubbock schools.

There have been improvements in diversity as well.

David Buckberry, a planner with the City of Lubbock, said he has observed a trend toward more varied neighborhoods.

"We're actually very far from complete integration," he said "but we've made a lot of progress there."

And there's the North and East Lubbock Redevelopment project, created by Mayor Marc McDougal, which Patterson believes has great potential to help bring economic prospects to minorities.

"Many young people leave Lubbock because there aren't opportunities," Patterson said.

DeLeon said she agrees minorities are often overlooked when it comes to jobs.

"Until we get people in leadership that do not hire by color, but do hire by qualifications, things will change very slowly," she said.

DeLeon said she believes the best way to fight racism is for the community to work together and for people to get involved politically to incite change.

Patterson said although laws and ordinances are good, they are not the answer.

"You cannot legislate it," he said. "You gotta live through it. And your heart's got to be right."

Patterson said he believes all Americans need to work on their heart attitudes and realize that "we are all God's children."

But the greatest key to eliminating racism, he believes, is instilling respect and understanding in the upcoming generation.

"Tell the children, we all got to get along," he said.

© Copyright 2006 Daily Toreador

filed: social.issues

Guest Feature: Lubbock in the Dark III: Prostitution

2006-04-05T11:12:00.000-05:00

WARNING: Mature and disturbing themes follow, detailing some ugly details of prostitution. Kids, talk to your parents before you read this.

Ruth Bradley is a crack reporter and an official Friend of the Brink. She's got a five-part series on social issues in Lubbock, Texas running in the Texas Tech student paper, the Daily Toreador. We'll link to the articles, and we'll also run them here since you have to sign up to view them on the site.

Anita Morales was 14 years old when she first sold her body for sex. The price was $30.

She took cues from her friend Lita, a fellow homeless teen, who had worked the streets since she was 12 years old.

"She told me to take the money up front and just go in there, take off my clothes and lay on the bed," Morales said.

Morales knew she needed the money. But she did not know how she would feel after the stranger had finished.

"It made me want to hide," she said. "It was a mark that had been placed on me - like somebody just threw paint on me. I felt like everybody could see it."

That same day, Morales and Lita spent their earnings on drugs and got high together.

"Right then and there, I felt that I had found the escape for the disgrace I had just endured," Morales said.

It was an escape into a cycle Morales said most women on the street are caught in - one of shame and dependency.

"(I) continued in my prostitution," she said, "so I could continue in my escape, and in doing so, I became an addict."

Eighteen years later Morales sits in a Lubbock County Jail cell. She is small, 5 feet 5 inches, with large eyes and curly hair pulled into pigtails. She has worked the streets off and on ever since that day.

"It's not something that I like to do," she said, "but it seems like its something that's calling me back."

Morales is incarcerated on charges related to her drug abuse for the second time. The first time, she spent her time and money on a correspondence course, earning her associate degree in child psychology. But when she got out of prison, she found the degree was not enough to get her a job. A fast food chain told her she was overqualified. Other companies couldn't see past her criminal background.

"When times get hard, I go back to what I know," Morales said. "For me, that's prostitution."

Sex workers like Morales are more common in Lubbock than people think, said Cpl. Theresa Bulls of the Lubbock Police Department.

"Most people don't see them for what they are or know about it, but it's been a problem," she said.

The exact number of women is difficult to pin down because many prostitutes come through Lubbock only to leave soon after for another city, Bulls said.

Morales recalled a group of at least 15 to 20 women that she used to work with on Lubbock streets. Freddy Harris, outreach worker for the Lubbock Regional Mental Health Mental Retardation Center, said he knows of at least 25 women working in Lubbock now. He said he believes there are many more he does not know of.

"I think in some parts of the community, some citizens see it as a big problem," said Lubbock City Councilwoman Linda DeLeon.

DeLeon said she receives one or two complaints a year about prostitutes in her district. One complaint involved a group of prostitutes who were working a corner near a school bus stop.

Residential sightings do occur from time to time, Bulls said.

"A lot of these neighborhood kids are going to know who they are for what they are," she said. "They become desensitized to the actual problems that are going on. It tells them it's a way of life."

Prostitution is a misdemeanor for the first two convictions and a felony for the third, said Bulls. Several times a year, the Lubbock Police Department conducts stings in which officers go undercover to catch women in the act of prostitution or men in the act of soliciting.

"It's prostitution for (men), just like it's prostitution for the women," Bulls said. "Both people are guilty of it."

And prostitution is not just a crime - it's a crime that attracts other crimes. Bulls said prostitutes tend to be surrounded by theft, drug abuse and crimes of violence - even murder.

In September 2005, pregnant prostitute Summer Baldwin, 29, was beaten to death, stuffed into a suitcase and left at a Lubbock city landfill. In 2004, Linda Trevino Carbajal was found dead in the middle of a road just outside New Deal, killed by a blunt-force head wound. In 2003, in a ditch west of Slaton, the body of Cynthia Palacio was found, partially nude and strangled to death. All were friends of Morales.

After the murders, Morales said she and her friends started a "buddy system," watching out for each other more, making sure they knew who their friends were "dating" (a term the women use for having sex). But violence still occurs.

Morales was raped often, once for two hours straight. She was beaten and left for dead three times. Once, a client tried to stab her in the face. Her hand is scarred where she blocked the knife.

"I'm real paranoid now," she said. "It's a weird life. I don't even know why we indulge ourselves in this madness. 'Cause it is, it's crazy."

The majority of the women Morales knew are battered other ways, too, living this lifestyle to get away from abuse or neglect in their former lives.

"Most of us keep hoping we'll find someone who cares about us, just for us," she said. "But nine times out of 10 it doesn't happen because of who we are - what we've become."

Prostitutes also battle disease. Although most use protection, many men will pay extra if they do not. And even with protection, prostitutes always are at high risk.

"Sex workers have a lot of sex partners," said Vilka Scott, disease intervention specialist for the City of Lubbock Health Department. "When it comes to disease, the more partners you have the more disease you spread."

Morales said several of the women she knew had diseases, but worked anyway. And since the same men often come back looking for different partners, it is difficult to avoid having sex with someone who has a disease.

"We just can't pinpoint who they've dated," Morales said, "so it's like we're playing Russian roulette with our lives."

Harris regularly distributes free condoms to prostitutes on behalf of MHMR, a service that helps greatly, Morales said.

"If it wasn't for them, there'd be a lot of diseases going around," she said.

Although many women charge whatever they can, Morales has set specific prices: $40 for oral, $50 for sex, $60 for both. On a good night, Morales said she would date close to 15 men, and on a regular night, five or six. And then there were the nights when no one came. On these bad nights, she remembers walking aimlessly up and down the streets all night with the other women, because they had nowhere else to go.

Morales said each of the women she knew was special in some way - beautiful, or musically talented or kind.

"But they settle for less because they feel it's OK," she said. "They feel they're not worth more."

Bulls said she believes that many of these women started out as victims.

"But at some point, they have to realize what they are doing," she said.

When they do reach this moment, Morales believes most prostitutes do want to get out, but don't know how to escape.

"It's not like there's a prostitution anonymous," she said. "If there was something that could be offered to us, a majority would take it."

She paused and sighed deeply.

"How do you relieve your weariness?" Morales said.

Morales said she knows 14-year-olds and 50-year-olds who are prostitutes - little girls entering the nightmare that the woman standing on the corner next to them can't stop.

"We want to get out of this lifestyle so bad, but this is all we know," she said. "This is what we've been through, and change is hard, and change is scary."

She laughs.

"People don't just come up to prostitutes on the street and say, 'Hey you want another chance at life?'"

But some are beginning to. In Memphis, Tenn., that is exactly what Carol Wiley is trying to do with the faith-based "A Way Out" program, an outreach of Citizens for Community Values of Memphis.

"The goal is to help any woman to get out of the sex-for-sale industry," Wiley said.

The organization does this by providing counseling, drug rehab, housing and training for jobs and in parental skills. And they meet these women where they are, visiting street corners with their message of hope for those who want it.

Wiley said working with these broken women takes persistence.

"It's hard at times, but it's also a real joy when that light comes on and they get it," she said, "(that) they are worth more than standing out on a street corner."

Wiley said she hopes to help start other programs like theirs. More information about "A Way Out" can be found at www.ccvmemphis.org or by calling (901) 685-1493.

Other cities have programs that can help, though not specifically for prostitutes. Dallas, Houston, Temple and Corpus Christi have programs that can help these women to get off drugs and back to their lives, said Harris.

"In Lubbock, we don't have stuff like that," he said. "We're behind times. We're slow-motion."

Harris said he would like to see the city and churches get involved in helping these women by helping them get rehab, jobs and homes.

"If you're gonna take drugs out of this hand, put something in the other hand," he said.

Morales said she encourages prostitutes to look for that help and to learn to understand their value.

"Our lives are precious," she said. "And we're worth more than what we're settling for."

Copyright 2006 Daily Toreador

For more on the Memphis, Tennessee program A Way Out, see this article.

filed: social.issues

Guest Feature: Lubbock in the Dark II: Child Abuse

2006-04-04T10:47:00.000-05:00

Ruth Bradley is a crack reporter and an official Friend of the Brink. She's got a five-part series on social issues in Lubbock, Texas running in the Texas Tech student paper, the Daily Toreador. We'll link to the articles, and we'll also run them here since you have to sign up to view them on the site.

Every day, somewhere in Lubbock County, a child is abused.

Sometimes the abuse is emotional. Sometimes it's sexual or physical. And sometimes the abuse will end the child's life.

"We've had children that die, children that sustain pretty serious injuries," said Shawn Vandygriff, investigation program director for Children's Protective Services. "Children are hurt every day in our community because they don't have someone to protect them."

In Lubbock, reported abuse is high, according to the Texas Kids Count 2005, a compilation of statistics from the year 2004, found at www.cppp.org. Out of counties in Texas in 2004, Lubbock ranked 19th in size. It ranked third in the number of children in foster care. And it ranked fourth in child abuse, with a rate of 12.2 per 1,000 children. The Texas rate was 8.2.

Vandygriff said these high numbers may be the result of awareness and subsequent reporting in the Lubbock community. Although official numbers for 2005 have not yet been released, Vandygriff estimated that nearly 2,500 cases of suspected abuse were reported. Of these, between 25 percent and 30 percent were confirmed by Children's Protective Services.

In Texas, reporting suspected child abuse is mandatory.

Abuse falls into seven categories, said Catherine Bass, executive director of the Children's Advocacy Center of the South Plains. These include physical abuse, emotional abuse, medical neglect, abandonment, neglectful supervision, physical neglect and sexual abuse. Regardless of type, most cases have one thing in common: The perpetrator is usually someone the child loves.

"Eighty to 90 percent of our perpetrators are people that we know, people that we trust," said Dakesa Piña, director of clinical services for the Children's Advocacy Center.

When Bass was growing up, the catch phrase for child abuse was "stranger-danger."

Now, she said, out of almost 650 cases the Child's Advocacy Center dealt with last year, only four involved strangers.

Motivating factors behind abuse are varied, said Vandygriff. Abuse can stem from frustration, stress, lack of good parenting skills, and, especially, substance abuse.

"We've seen a substantial number of children and a singular increase in problems due to drugs and alcohol," said Vandygriff. "Because, of course, when you're impaired, you can't take care of your kids."

And sometimes, people become perpetrators because they themselves were once victims, Vandygriff said.

This is just one of the many long-term effects of child abuse, Piña said.

"The kids deal with things like nightmares, problems sleeping, what we call semantic problems," Piña said. "Kids sometimes will get aggressive behavior, cause they don't know how to communicate what they're going through."

Piña said victims of sexual abuse are especially likely to deal with the effects of their abuse later in life.

"You can be ashamed of your body," Piña said. "You can not be able to have intimate relationships (because) it might trigger the feelings you had when you were sexually abused."

Sexual abuse is prevalent in Lubbock, Vandygriff said, and is usually committed by a close family member, such as a father or a mother's boyfriend.

Bass said a close relationship enables the perpetrator to build trust.

"Normally it's someone who has access to the child that can groom them and make them feel like it's OK," Bass said.

Girls are three times more likely to be sexually abused, but that number may be slanted because boys are less likely to report it, Piña said.

Sexual abuse also is difficult to pinpoint because the symptoms are not as apparent as they are with other types of abuse.

"We rely pretty heavily on … the child making an outcry," Vandygriff said.

Many children simply do not recognize what is going on, Piña said, and do not know enough about sex to protect themselves.

"We don't like to talk to kids about sex and sexual things," she said. "But it's important that we educate them."

One of the goals of the Children's Advocacy Center is to help children pinpoint what is happening and be able to communicate it. Children's Protective Services and the Lubbock Police bring children to the center for interviews, which are videotaped for use by investigators and sometimes as court testimony.

Bass said this recorded interview makes it easier for agencies to work together and also helps the child who does not have to constantly relive the experience as a result of multiple interviews.

The center also provides counseling for children and non-offending family members.

"It helps my parent and my child to reconnect," Piña said. "Abuse can be very isolating. You feel like you're alone. You feel like you're the only one."

Support for non-offending parents, who often feel deep guilt for what has happened, is especially important, Piña said.

"That's our support system," she said. "If we don't take care of our parents, our kids aren't going to be OK."

Maintaining the family unit is important to Children's Protective Services as well. In cases where children should be removed from their homes, a social worker usually will work with the parents to help them create a "plan of service" to help define changes that need to be made before the children will be returned.

Kevin Hart, associate judge for the South Plains Foster Care Court, said plans of service often require participation in parenting classes, psychological evaluations or treatment for substance abuse.

Hart, who oversees all cases involving children and foster care in Lubbock and eight other surrounding counties, said he looks at the level of the parents' level of fulfillment of the plan to help him decide the outcome of the child's case.

"The ultimate thing I'm looking for is whether the parents can provide the child with a safe and secure home," Hart said.

Volunteers with Court Appointed Special Advocates also help Hart make his final decision. When a case is brought before the court, Hart appoints a member of CASA as a guardian ad litem, a special temporary guardian for the child or children involved. This volunteer will work with the child, Children's Protective Services and the child's parents and foster parents.

"Based on that information they receive, their role is to recommend to me, as judge, what the outcome should be in the case," Hart said.

Children are returned to their homes in about 50 percent of all cases, Hart said.

"If parental rights are terminated, then kids will stay in foster care until an adoptive home can be found for them," Hart said.

But foster homes are scarce. Hart said children from the Lubbock area often must be sent to homes in surrounding communities, such as Midland or Amarillo. There is a need for more foster parents or relief parents (families who take children for a short period of time to give foster parents a break).

There's also a growing need for CASA volunteers, Bass said, and for people to get involved in public education about abuse.

"People can help raise awareness to legislators about those kinds of issues," she said.

And they can work to educate their community. In April, which is Child Abuse Prevention Month, volunteers with the Family Guidance and Outreach Center of Lubbock will cover the city with blue ribbons as reminders of the problem, said Alaina Bloodworth, program coordinator for the organization. The group also is planning a candlelight ceremony to commemorate victims of child abuse and to raise public awareness. It will be at 7 p.m. on April 4 at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 3321 33rd St.

More information about volunteer opportunities can be obtained by contacting CASA at (806) 763-2272, the Children's Advocacy Center at (806) 740-0251 or the Family Guidance and Outreach Center at (806) 747-5577.

The best way to get involved however, Bass said, is to simply watch out for the children of the community.

"Just be aware of what's around you, and report if you think something is wrong," she said. "(Child abuse) does happen, but there are things that we can do to help prevent it."

Copyright 2006 Daily Toreador

filed: social.issues

Guest Feature: Lubbock In The Dark: Homelessness

2006-04-03T17:50:00.000-05:00

Ruth Bradley is a crack reporter and an official Friend of the Brink. She's got a five-part series on social issues in Lubbock, Texas running in the Texas Tech student paper, the Daily Toreador. We'll link to the articles, and we'll also run them here since you have to sign up to view them on the site.

Every day in Lubbock there are stories that go untold, pain that goes unheeded, cries that go unheard. This is the beginning of an answer to those cries. This is the first story in a daily five-part series about social problems in Lubbock, such as homelessness, prostitution and abuse. This is the side of Lubbock few people ever see, these are whispers barely noticed, lives lived out in the shadows. This is Lubbock in the Dark.

Erika Cook lives behind a Dumpster. Evicted from her apartment after the friend she lived with was hospitalized, she spends her days searching for a job, her nights huddled next to a pile of the few belongings she has left. She is alone. And a few weeks ago, she was attacked.

Cook said three men jumped her, coming up from behind.

"I was way outnumbered," she said.

Since the incident, which she did not elaborate on, Cook has worked hard to avoid people, trying to stay hidden.

"I'm scared and nervous," Cook said, "and wishing I could have found a job before I lost my place."

Mary George Beyer of Family Promise of Lubbock, a non-profit agency that provides temporary care for homeless families, said many of the homeless in Lubbock are in this same situation.

"They don't want to be seen," Beyer said. "They're afraid. Many of them are afraid of being robbed, either by another homeless person or by someone who just thinks it's fun."

Because of this Lubbock has an "invisible homeless," a group of people who live inconspicuously on the streets trying to avoid perpetrators and incidentally avoiding the community in general, Beyer said.

"Because they are not seen as much as they are in bigger cities, we don't think of there being a homeless problem," said Diane Hudson, family services director for the Salvation Army of Lubbock. "Ours are more of a hidden homeless."

Hidden from harm, but also from help. Because it is difficult to find these people, it is difficult to count them, a governmental requirement when requesting grants to assist in homeless care, Beyer said. Moreover, it means that many Lubbock citizens are unaware of the problem and its severity.

In January, 260 homeless were counted in local shelters. Bob Terrell, president of the South Plains Homeless Consortium, the organization that enacted the count, said the actual number of homeless in the area is probably much higher.

"We don't have any real idea," he said. "It's almost impossible to get a handle on it."

Terrell said many homeless simply don't want to be counted. Others live in places that would be unsafe for volunteers to survey.

Based on case notes, Hudson said the Salvation Army estimates that Lubbock has close to 300 chronic homeless; that is, men and women who stay homeless.

Though some of these have no better option because of personal mental health issues, Hudson said a portion of chronic homeless choose their lifestyle deliberately.

"There's lots of different reasons for a person choosing to be homeless," Hudson said.

Mark Stone, a homeless man, said he knows homeless people who don't want to get off the streets. But people often point to them as the norm, he said, while ignoring the needs of people who genuinely need and want help.

Many of these are people who have been forced out of their homes by overwhelming circumstances. An estimated 100 Lubbock citizens are expected to lose their homes within the next few months, said Connie Hindman, executive director for Family Promise of Lubbock. Some of these are people living paycheck to paycheck, one financial disaster away from the streets. Others are hurricane evacuees, whose Federal Emergency Management Agency money is about to run out.

"I think that homelessness is the social issue of this decade," said Hindman, citing natural disasters like Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina. "Being homeless could happen to anybody."

It happened to Richard Moore. While living in Dallas, he commuted nearly 20 miles to work every day. When his car broke down, he had no choice but to quit his job. Unable to find work, he lived on the streets of Dallas for a time before making his way to Lubbock.

"Crime is rampant," said Moore, speaking of Dallas. "I haven't really met a bad apple around here."

While the streets of Lubbock may be safer, Moore said shelter and programs are much more limited.

"I think here there's a lot of indifference," he said.

Assistance is also hard to find, said J.D., a resident at the Salvation Army dorms who didn't want to give his full name.

"A lot of people just don't know where to go for help," he said.

The Lubbock Salvation Army provides shelter for three nights in a row, once a month per person. According to Beyer, this is the only shelter available for men without children. Women can apply to My Father's House or sometimes Women's Protective Services. Families are eligible to apply for Family Promise of Lubbock's program, which provides housing at local churches for a small number of families. Carpenter's Church provides a place to stay during the day and allows members of the church to sleep there on cold nights.

But there is always a hot meal.

"No one should be hungry in Lubbock," said Tom Clark, a volunteer at the South Plains Food Bank's Second Helpings Soup Kitchen, which provides meals for around 150 Lubbock citizens every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Clark said the Salvation Army and Broadway Church of Christ cover the other days of the week.

The city of Lubbock also provides help with jobs. Homeless can visit the Texas Workforce Commission, use a call center at Carpenter's Church and are allowed voice mail with the Salvation Army for 90 days to enable potential employees to contact them.

Even these resources may not be enough, said Kelcie Kopf, a doctoral student in Texas Tech's College of Education who recently spent a night on the streets to learn about the homeless.

"If we want them to get jobs and keep jobs, we need to find them a place to stay off the streets," she said.

If they do find a job, homeless struggle to stay presentable, to get a good night's sleep and to find food, since the kitchens serve during business hours, Kopf said. Even if they can do all these things, they don't have a place to store their earnings, since most banks require that customers have a place of residence.

"They're put in danger because they're having to walk around the street with lots of money," Kopf said.

She said she believes Lubbock needs temporary shelters to help the homeless to get back on their feet.

Hindman said there is also a need for more affordable homes.

"Lubbock desperately needs low-cost housing," said Hindman. "We have a little, but the waiting list is so long."

Lubbock's North Overton district, one large site of low-cost housing was bought out in 2003 by McDougal Companies. Since then, the company has demolished the majority of the houses in the area to make way for construction of several mid-to-high cost housing developments.

"Short term, that was where the way affordable housing was," said Frye. "And it's all gone now."

Frye said Mayor Marc McDougal has been working on the problem, and the Mayor has met with him several times to discuss solutions.

Another problem in Lubbock is funds, particularly following the hurricanes this summer.

"I was very conflicted over the entire city of Lubbock's response to the Katrina evacuees," Beyer said. "The city of Lubbock did not reserve resources for our own."

Frye said financial contributions to Katrina and Rita evacuees also have affected Lubbock programs.

Contributions and volunteers are always needed, Hindman said.

"One thing [Lubbockites] can do is help support the organizations that are already in place," she said.

It's also important to treat the homeless with respect, Hindman said, and to give them a chance.

"So many people have the idea 'if those people would just get a job they wouldn't be homeless," she said. "Well, some of those people are working two jobs, and they are homeless."

Hindman tells the story of a man who came to Family Promise of Lubbock for help who told her he was scared to apply for the program.

"I asked 'what frightened you?'" she said. "He said 'I was so afraid of what you would think of me.'"

Mary Guetersloh, who works with the outreach ministry for St. Matthew's Church, said the way many homeless are treated makes them feel like they're "not worthy, they're trash, throw-away people." This often affects their ability to accept help.

"It's hard for them to trust in anything that comes their way," she said.

But for those who do, there is hope.

Hindman said when families leave Family Promise, they move into homes of their own. Most of them will keep these homes.

Moore enrolled in a program offered by the Lubbock Regional Mental Health Mental Retardation Center, which paid for his first month's rent. He is currently looking for a job.

J.D. is living in the dorms at Salvation Army while he works at one of their stores.

And Cook? A formerly homeless friend, who just got off the streets, offered her a place to stay.

For more information about volunteer opportunities to help the homeless in Lubbock, contact Hindman at (806) 744-5035 or Hudson at (806) 765-9434.

This is story one of "Lubbock in the Dark," a five-part series on social issues in Lubbock. Tomorrow's topic: Drug Abuse. Copyright 2006 Daily Toreador

filed: social.issues

Self-Worth and the Idiot

2006-03-30T14:10:00.000-06:00

There's nothing worse than a confident idiot.

Ben, Official Friend of the Brink

This thought, along with corollaries like the Bible's "Even a fool is considered wise when he opens not his mouth", make a brilliant case that modern society (and especially our public education system) should focus less on convincing people of their self-worth and more on education so that some of that self-confidence might be justified.

filed: etcetera

RealFrogger in Austin

2006-03-29T15:28:00.000-06:00

In a melding of robot-vacuum technology with classic video games, individuals with electronics skills, alcohol and time on their hands have created and deployed RealFrogger on Austin's 6th Street.

Follow the link for pictures of this momentous event, and descriptions like this:

The impact of the technology on Austinites has already been deep. During the nerve-wracking initial crossing, which took place below the balcony of the Herald suite at Austin's Driskill Hotel, passers-by were heard to exclaim, "Dude, it's Frogger!"

Will RealFrogger survive? Will the police arrest anyone? Will Austin's traffic be slowed any further than it already is? Is that even possible?

RealFrogger Technology Revealed at SXSW

filed: etcetera

Geekonomics, The Matrix, and Happiness

2006-03-29T10:55:00.000-06:00

In The Matrix, the machine character Agent Smith tells us that humans cannot survive in a utopia--they need pain and struggle or they will not accept their surroundings as real. It seems that a similar idea holds true in (semi-)real life with the economies of online games. This Wired article gives examples of experiments and incidents that prove that unlimited resources in a world lead not to universal happiness but instead cause all of the players to leave for lack of a challenge. The lesson: if you had all the money you could want you would be...bored.

Wired.com: Geekonomics

filed: economics